5 West Nursing

As I gathered my things after giving report, my director approached me and gave me “the look”. She say, “I need to talk to you, step this way.” I obliged. I hope this doesn’t take  more than a minute, I thought to myself, I’d hate her to call me in again for “incremental overtime.”

“Quality control tells me you don’t enter your vital signs and I/Os in the computer. You need to enter them because they can see it at QA.”, she says. “Oh, ok.”, I replied just so I can leave. On my way home I’m thinking, why do we have to record vital signs on a paper form every hour, and enter vitals in the computer as well? Why do we have to be redundantly reduntant? As far as I know, redundancy just opens you up for errors. Besides, electronic medical records should make your work easier, not burdensome. Unfortunately for us, the interface development team at OPUS managed to inflict more pain in the newly redesigned vital signs flowsheet form. Yet another case of, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!”