Observations and Assessments

Notions to small for a blog post, all in one place.

You need to take your pain medication. Once upon a time, TorontoEmerg had some fairly significant surgery on a major joint. It was (theoretically) exceeding painful, but fortunately TorontoEmerg’s orthopod was very generous in supplying TorontoEmerg with Percocets and Tylenol 3s, and thusly TorontoEmerge experienced very little pain. Even when going to (really) painful physio, TorontoEmerg was kept more-or-less comfortable and at the end had a full recovery —- all because of adequate pain control.

TorontoEmerg was an RN, and knew how to take pain medication effectively.

So when five patients show up at Triage in one with poor pain control post operatively, even with adequate analgesia prescribed, TorontoEmerg begins to think some surgical nurses know squat about pain control and/or failing to teach adequately about analgesia when discharging patients. It isn’t about throwing a script for some opioid at patients and telling them to take the med “when the pain is really bad.” Is there is some deficit in our training which makes us reluctant to counsel patients on pain control?

You need to take your stool softener. Same topic. Different angle. I had several patients come to Triage yesterday for constipation related to opiate use post-operatively. None of them had any instructions about preventing or addressing what to do about the (inevitable) constipation. Again, why are we screwing up our discharge instructions?

Myth of the Queen Bee. Some research probably pertinent to nurses aspiring to leadership positions.

Drop Me a Postcard. This is kind of cool: internet postcards you can drag and drop to email, Face Observations and Assessments book/Twitter messages, which pose some pertinent, challenging, difficult questions. From droppingknowledge.org.

How to deal with difficult colleagues. It seems too simple.

“Please do not let them breed.” Yep.

Size does matter. I thought this story was interesting because it exemplifies the anti-science, anti-intellectual climate we seem to be labouring under. Shorter version: right-wing web sites excoriate supposedly taxpayer-funded study of penis size and gay men’s health as trivial and frivolous, except, as it turns out, the study was not directly funded by the U.S. government and there is in fact an important correlation between sexual health and penis size, which in turn has implications for reducing HIV transmission.

Speaking of bad food. Deep fried butter. Really. Move over cheeseburger-on-a-glazed-doughnut. As Sean says, I’m speechless.

Dumb road signs

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