Recently, an article in The Atlanta Journal Constitution detailed how the Georgia Board of Nursing secretly handles more than half of its disciplinary cases.  What I gather from the article is that nurses who are put into a monitoring program, as long as they are compliant, will have not have discipline against their license. The article pointed out that in 2017, the Board has 333 new disciplinary orders.  Of that number, 54% were private with just under half of that group being alcohol or … [Read more...]

On April 12th of this year, Christann Shyvin Gainey, L.P.N., was caring for a patient named H.R. McMaster, Sr. who was recovering from a stroke in a Pennsylvania facility.  During her shift and unwitnessed, Mr. McMaster fell and nurse Gainey was seen on surveillance video failing to perform neuro checks thereafter as required by the facility’s policy.  Mr. McMaster was found dead sitting in the lobby of the facility.  He suffered blunt trauma to the head from an unwitnessed fall and developed a … [Read more...]

As nurses, we are the front line of patient safety. These days, hospitals are run as corporations and tend to put profits ahead of patients.  We need to change this.  People come first! Because hospitals are now run like businesses, productivity experts and personnel who are not nurses, ask us to do so much more with less.  Administration is squeezing nurses to put their patients’ lives at risk and their licenses on the line. I am all for mandatory nurse patient ratios.  While I think it … [Read more...]

No one ever has become a nurse so that they can sit to document all the care they provided to their patients.  Yet, documentation is one of the most important parts of our practice.  As much as any of you may dislike documentation, it serves a very important purpose to protect your license and your livelihood as well as protecting you if a medical malpractice claim should arise. One thing nurses seldom realize is that when they late chart or enter something in a record which is not timed, an … [Read more...]