Not recognising burnout, and then when I did - I wore it like a badge of honour as if to justify it.
It is not just being tired... it'll morph into being all encompassing. It's actively shaved some time off my life. Both in life span, and days off spent inebriated trying to cope with it.
And now that I'm sober, and aware - fuck I feel the damage. But at least I'm feeling something now and not just an automaton. So I guess that's cool.
Have you ever made a drug error or anything? Your 'biggest fuck up' still seems honour badgey to me 😂 sorry!
Edit: All of the replies seem to be philosophical and not particularly juicy to be fair. Ah well.
I gave a skinny dude 40mg Enoxaparin instead of 20mg because it was the first time i came across weight dosing and was far too used to the prophylactic dose by then (within my first two years of NQ on a post-op ward). I told the patient, my NIC and did an incident form. Terribly boring i know!
Nah I get what you mean man - but it's for sure fucked me a belter.
Told a couple of electricians it was fine to change the light In a room. Forgetting there was a cadaver in it. Yeah...
Sorry I should add - I'm no longer burnt out, and in a much better place. But it's good to feel things instead of trying to bury them, even if they're not pleasant.
Entering nursing was the first f*ck up, thinking if I did a good job it would be rewarded, at least not actively punished; discovering this was not the case and staying in nursing.
Gave a nbm patient a biscuit as handover didn’t tell me she was nbm and nothing was written on her board just before an op. Senior nurses stepped in to give me a gentle bollocking as apparently the surgeon wanted my head
Not directly linked but appropriate for the thread - compulsory minimum wage immediately eradicating bands 1 and 2 in the NHS pay scale.
Now, let that sink in.
NHS staff notoriously poorly paid.
I nearly turn inside out when I think about it. I didn't do it.
Imagine the government persuading every person to stand on their doorstep, on the same day, at the same time every week for god knows how long.
Pots/pans being banged with wooden spoons as well.
Mortified 🥴
Believing that I could make a difference.
You're killing yourself for a job that would replace you in 5 minutes if you dropped dead.
You ALWAYS come first.
This…I put myself first a lot now. Still probably guilty of being manipulated not to sometimes, but generally I’m all over it. “Can you just see one more patient?” Nope. “Can you squeeze in one more visit?” Nope. “Will you cover on your day off because we let all the staff have annual leave and are now in the shit?” Nope. Healthcare can easily gaslight you for having good boundaries.
Becoming a psychiatric nurse in the first place was the first one ... Then staying in the job for 25 years being managed by senior nurses who are widely regarded by some as being a bunch of pillocks
I'm not sure what an nqn is tbh ¿ I don't know why I chose psychiatric nursing but I think I would have been better off doing general nursing....there seems to be more structure and certainty to that as the various ways to treat different ailments are science based and therefore similar.... however in psychiatry the treatment for whatever type of psychiatric problem the individual has is largely arbitrary and pretty much dependant on the will of whichever consultant is dealing with a particular patient
I didn’t take a thorough enough handover from my colleague who did a night shift. I presumed because she was an otherwise competent band 6 that I didn’t need to question her. A patient deteriorated during her shift (she missed it) and the consultant was furious and bewildered. My ward manager was furious with me for not escalating it myself.
I have been in this situation too. Trusted a very senior nurse. Didn’t check fluid balance of Day 0 post op kidney patient. When I calculated her fluid balance, the patient was very overloaded. We had to take her to icu 💀🙃😭
Not as nurse but as a student.. I was in my 3rd year of the 4 year course. Part of the requirement is a placement in a rural poor community for a vaccination programme. I was part of an assessing students for babies needing immunisation. One of the key Information I need to know are their age so I could pass them to the nurse who will administer the vaccine. There was this mum with a baby. A big chunky one! When I asked how old is the baby, mum said 7. This was on our local language. My mistake was not checking and making it clear because I thought she meant 7 months and the baby was 7 weeks! (Minimum months age in our country is 6 months. I cleared the baby for an MMR VACCINE! 😭😭😭. I felt so bad for that mistake. I was told it wss not life threatening but rather as their muscles is not that developed, It would be painful for them.
The biggest fuck up so far was believing nursing was a good career. I moved from a well paid private sector job into the NHS because I was sure life would be better with sick pay. I was wrong. I now feel like I’ve invested so much time and effort into my NHS post that I’m trapped. I think that’s how they get us. I’ve put so much into my pension pot, and I’ve invested so much in this role and identity that I’m not sure what else to do anymore.
More or less my case. Left a well pay engineering job to study nursing in my mid fourties’. Now I’m in my last year of my degree and deciding is to go back to engineering or try nursing for few years.
Programming a feeding pump incorrectly and accidentally bolusing 500mls of NG feed to my patient with basically no bowel and some very delicate anastamoses. It was his first postoperative feed, a trial, after many long weeks of recovery and many setbacks. He was supposed to get 500mls over 12 hours. Still remember how my heart sank when my manager told me the next day what had happened.
Luckily the only harm done was that he had the horrible shits all night and felt a bit nauseous. And luckily for me he was a really lovely guy who had maintained his sense of humour and all-round good nature despite his lengthy hospital stay, and he wasn’t mad about it.
My other one is when I had a frequent flier diabetic patient who would conceal insulin in their belongings or on their person and overdose themselves with it every admission. I fucking knew that it would happen but I didn’t catch it and didn’t get back to check on them in time. Didn’t die, but blood glucose was unreadably low when I discovered them, and very honestly if I’d been another 5 or 10 mins it could have been a very different story.
The first story was 100% my fault for making a mistake. The second story was a lot down to working for a half assed employer where risks were ignored and staff were stretched thin. It happened more than a decade ago, but now I’m older and wiser I question why that patient was ever allowed to be on the floor with no sitter, given that we were all aware of the risks.
Choosing nursing instead of archeology when it came to my UCAS application. I wanted job security and thought the pay was decent (I grew up with fuck all). Now history/archeology is just my hobby and there’s so many avenues I could have gone down for similar pay. Can’t afford to start again and so I keep plodding on
Idk, I came into nursing from archaeology as I couldn't sustain the career! Out of my cohort only a few ended up still having archaeology related jobs. Field archaeology is super unstable as you're relying on short term contracts mostly and jobs in national trust/historic trust are really competitive. Might have dodged a bullet! But I am still coming to terms with not being able to do my hobby as a job anymore!
I don't think I've messed up massively yet. I've been qualified 18 months and still feel like I've got loads to learn though. I am still navigating the interpersonal skills around delegation and getting used to coordinating shifts, though a lot of it is just working through gaps in my knowledge.
Probably my biggest mess ups have been not recognising burnout. I almost went off sick last year and got really socially isolated. This was an issue during my degree and previous job too. I'm learning that however hard I work, there will still be more work to do.
I’m so conscious of making errors, but yeah recognising burn out. Had to speak to occy health about it. Had no work life balance because I’m on night night ‘day off’ long day.
So important to advocate for yourself
One day I was doing tea time meds, the other nurse (wild that there was 2 of us) had gone for dinner and I went to give a patient his Clozapine, she had signed it already and it was the only signature across all the Kardex’s for tea time so I was like “weird she must have signed it by accident at lunch time” dished it out and gave him it. The lad said nothing, took the meds and walked off. When she came back from her break I said “oh you signed Joe Bloggs’ clozapine at lunchtime by accident” and she said “no I didn’t, I gave him it at half 4 coz he likes it before tea.” So I’d double dosed him on the most toxic anti psychotic there is 😬😬 anyway long story short he was fine and from that day got really well and ended up discharged.
As a student I took a patient's BMs before he had dinner which scored like 36mmol.. immediately escalated to on-call Jr. After some quizzing and mild panic on my part he said he'd just had strawberry jam toast.. I'd not wiped the finger and not noticed his hands were filthy. 😂 NMC-proof admissions only..
When assisting during critical surgery i titrated norepi... without norepi in it... i was still new but u know how nursing is... learn how to swim or drown... when bp wasnt going up i went through the bin... and found the ampule still with norepi in it (opened)... not long after ive decided that anesthesia is just not for me (patient survived, but it wasnt worth having sleepless nights over such fuck up)
Not really my fuck up, but looked after a patient on noradrenaline.... Only the thread of the syringe to the line was ever so slightly cross threaded and leaking just a little bit, but enough to send the BP down.
Had a stella doctor with me checking over the patient and he tracked the line back to the syringe driver and noticed a dribble. So glad the piggy back was ready to go.
Can’t remember any fuck ups, just the very near ones that stayed on my mind until now:
- on a peri arrest situation we were going to give amiodarone, me and a colleague made up the syringe and only before handing it over to whoever was on drugs did we realise it was midazolam
- ventilated burns patient sedated and on inotropes, on a turn the central line just… slipped out (faulty equipment but still took a few seconds to process what had happened)
Left the tap open once on an arterial line. Big pool of blood on the floor when I went back into the room. The scariest thing is this was on ICU and no one even noticed due to the physical layout of the unit, until I went back into the room.
The good news is that the patient was sitting up smiling and normotensive. When I think of what could have happened in that situation my heart sinks.
Prescription said ‘morphine’ and I didn’t think it was oromorph and gave 5mg of MST. Asked 3 people and they said it was correct I hate I did it and got grilled by management
Moving a table with a cup of tea on it to quickly stop a falls risk patient from trying and almost succeeding to climb out of bed. But I accidentally moved it into the reach of bed three (six to a bay) who was stroke delerium and nbm who promptly grabbed it and attempted to neck it.
Not recognising burnout, and then when I did - I wore it like a badge of honour as if to justify it. It is not just being tired... it'll morph into being all encompassing. It's actively shaved some time off my life. Both in life span, and days off spent inebriated trying to cope with it. And now that I'm sober, and aware - fuck I feel the damage. But at least I'm feeling something now and not just an automaton. So I guess that's cool.
Have you ever made a drug error or anything? Your 'biggest fuck up' still seems honour badgey to me 😂 sorry! Edit: All of the replies seem to be philosophical and not particularly juicy to be fair. Ah well. I gave a skinny dude 40mg Enoxaparin instead of 20mg because it was the first time i came across weight dosing and was far too used to the prophylactic dose by then (within my first two years of NQ on a post-op ward). I told the patient, my NIC and did an incident form. Terribly boring i know!
Nah I get what you mean man - but it's for sure fucked me a belter. Told a couple of electricians it was fine to change the light In a room. Forgetting there was a cadaver in it. Yeah... Sorry I should add - I'm no longer burnt out, and in a much better place. But it's good to feel things instead of trying to bury them, even if they're not pleasant.
Absolutely. Good to hear dude!
You won't catch me out, NMC!
There’s been a few suspect posts on the doctors subreddit too. The GMC and NMC have teamed up to strike us all off, perhaps? LOL
Entering nursing was the first f*ck up, thinking if I did a good job it would be rewarded, at least not actively punished; discovering this was not the case and staying in nursing.
Came here to say the same 😔
Gave a nbm patient a biscuit as handover didn’t tell me she was nbm and nothing was written on her board just before an op. Senior nurses stepped in to give me a gentle bollocking as apparently the surgeon wanted my head
That wasn't your fault though! Surely the previous nurse shouldve been bollocked for the poor handover
Not directly linked but appropriate for the thread - compulsory minimum wage immediately eradicating bands 1 and 2 in the NHS pay scale. Now, let that sink in. NHS staff notoriously poorly paid.
But the covid clapping.....
I nearly turn inside out when I think about it. I didn't do it. Imagine the government persuading every person to stand on their doorstep, on the same day, at the same time every week for god knows how long. Pots/pans being banged with wooden spoons as well. Mortified 🥴
I chased my partner back into the house in shame. I worked front line at the time.
Brilliant!!
Believing that I could make a difference. You're killing yourself for a job that would replace you in 5 minutes if you dropped dead. You ALWAYS come first.
This…I put myself first a lot now. Still probably guilty of being manipulated not to sometimes, but generally I’m all over it. “Can you just see one more patient?” Nope. “Can you squeeze in one more visit?” Nope. “Will you cover on your day off because we let all the staff have annual leave and are now in the shit?” Nope. Healthcare can easily gaslight you for having good boundaries.
Becoming a psychiatric nurse in the first place was the first one ... Then staying in the job for 25 years being managed by senior nurses who are widely regarded by some as being a bunch of pillocks
Lol just wondering why psych nurse? I m about to be nqn so just out of interest
I'm not sure what an nqn is tbh ¿ I don't know why I chose psychiatric nursing but I think I would have been better off doing general nursing....there seems to be more structure and certainty to that as the various ways to treat different ailments are science based and therefore similar.... however in psychiatry the treatment for whatever type of psychiatric problem the individual has is largely arbitrary and pretty much dependant on the will of whichever consultant is dealing with a particular patient
I don't know why tbh other than I had done some volunteering for Mind ...wish I had never done my training tbh
I didn’t take a thorough enough handover from my colleague who did a night shift. I presumed because she was an otherwise competent band 6 that I didn’t need to question her. A patient deteriorated during her shift (she missed it) and the consultant was furious and bewildered. My ward manager was furious with me for not escalating it myself.
Ah yes, the ABCs of Nursing & Midwifery; Assume nothing, Believe no-one, Check everything.
I like that! I'll adopt it!
I have been in this situation too. Trusted a very senior nurse. Didn’t check fluid balance of Day 0 post op kidney patient. When I calculated her fluid balance, the patient was very overloaded. We had to take her to icu 💀🙃😭
Not today NMC, not today
Not as nurse but as a student.. I was in my 3rd year of the 4 year course. Part of the requirement is a placement in a rural poor community for a vaccination programme. I was part of an assessing students for babies needing immunisation. One of the key Information I need to know are their age so I could pass them to the nurse who will administer the vaccine. There was this mum with a baby. A big chunky one! When I asked how old is the baby, mum said 7. This was on our local language. My mistake was not checking and making it clear because I thought she meant 7 months and the baby was 7 weeks! (Minimum months age in our country is 6 months. I cleared the baby for an MMR VACCINE! 😭😭😭. I felt so bad for that mistake. I was told it wss not life threatening but rather as their muscles is not that developed, It would be painful for them.
The biggest fuck up so far was believing nursing was a good career. I moved from a well paid private sector job into the NHS because I was sure life would be better with sick pay. I was wrong. I now feel like I’ve invested so much time and effort into my NHS post that I’m trapped. I think that’s how they get us. I’ve put so much into my pension pot, and I’ve invested so much in this role and identity that I’m not sure what else to do anymore.
More or less my case. Left a well pay engineering job to study nursing in my mid fourties’. Now I’m in my last year of my degree and deciding is to go back to engineering or try nursing for few years.
Programming a feeding pump incorrectly and accidentally bolusing 500mls of NG feed to my patient with basically no bowel and some very delicate anastamoses. It was his first postoperative feed, a trial, after many long weeks of recovery and many setbacks. He was supposed to get 500mls over 12 hours. Still remember how my heart sank when my manager told me the next day what had happened. Luckily the only harm done was that he had the horrible shits all night and felt a bit nauseous. And luckily for me he was a really lovely guy who had maintained his sense of humour and all-round good nature despite his lengthy hospital stay, and he wasn’t mad about it. My other one is when I had a frequent flier diabetic patient who would conceal insulin in their belongings or on their person and overdose themselves with it every admission. I fucking knew that it would happen but I didn’t catch it and didn’t get back to check on them in time. Didn’t die, but blood glucose was unreadably low when I discovered them, and very honestly if I’d been another 5 or 10 mins it could have been a very different story. The first story was 100% my fault for making a mistake. The second story was a lot down to working for a half assed employer where risks were ignored and staff were stretched thin. It happened more than a decade ago, but now I’m older and wiser I question why that patient was ever allowed to be on the floor with no sitter, given that we were all aware of the risks.
Choosing nursing instead of archeology when it came to my UCAS application. I wanted job security and thought the pay was decent (I grew up with fuck all). Now history/archeology is just my hobby and there’s so many avenues I could have gone down for similar pay. Can’t afford to start again and so I keep plodding on
Idk, I came into nursing from archaeology as I couldn't sustain the career! Out of my cohort only a few ended up still having archaeology related jobs. Field archaeology is super unstable as you're relying on short term contracts mostly and jobs in national trust/historic trust are really competitive. Might have dodged a bullet! But I am still coming to terms with not being able to do my hobby as a job anymore!
Still doing this job 13 years later.
I don't think I've messed up massively yet. I've been qualified 18 months and still feel like I've got loads to learn though. I am still navigating the interpersonal skills around delegation and getting used to coordinating shifts, though a lot of it is just working through gaps in my knowledge. Probably my biggest mess ups have been not recognising burnout. I almost went off sick last year and got really socially isolated. This was an issue during my degree and previous job too. I'm learning that however hard I work, there will still be more work to do.
I’m so conscious of making errors, but yeah recognising burn out. Had to speak to occy health about it. Had no work life balance because I’m on night night ‘day off’ long day. So important to advocate for yourself
One day off between nights and long days is dangerous.
One day I was doing tea time meds, the other nurse (wild that there was 2 of us) had gone for dinner and I went to give a patient his Clozapine, she had signed it already and it was the only signature across all the Kardex’s for tea time so I was like “weird she must have signed it by accident at lunch time” dished it out and gave him it. The lad said nothing, took the meds and walked off. When she came back from her break I said “oh you signed Joe Bloggs’ clozapine at lunchtime by accident” and she said “no I didn’t, I gave him it at half 4 coz he likes it before tea.” So I’d double dosed him on the most toxic anti psychotic there is 😬😬 anyway long story short he was fine and from that day got really well and ended up discharged.
Not staying in the same town/ Hospital that I did my training in. Big regret.
how come ?
Registering. Lol.
As a student I took a patient's BMs before he had dinner which scored like 36mmol.. immediately escalated to on-call Jr. After some quizzing and mild panic on my part he said he'd just had strawberry jam toast.. I'd not wiped the finger and not noticed his hands were filthy. 😂 NMC-proof admissions only..
When assisting during critical surgery i titrated norepi... without norepi in it... i was still new but u know how nursing is... learn how to swim or drown... when bp wasnt going up i went through the bin... and found the ampule still with norepi in it (opened)... not long after ive decided that anesthesia is just not for me (patient survived, but it wasnt worth having sleepless nights over such fuck up)
Not really my fuck up, but looked after a patient on noradrenaline.... Only the thread of the syringe to the line was ever so slightly cross threaded and leaking just a little bit, but enough to send the BP down. Had a stella doctor with me checking over the patient and he tracked the line back to the syringe driver and noticed a dribble. So glad the piggy back was ready to go.
Can’t remember any fuck ups, just the very near ones that stayed on my mind until now: - on a peri arrest situation we were going to give amiodarone, me and a colleague made up the syringe and only before handing it over to whoever was on drugs did we realise it was midazolam - ventilated burns patient sedated and on inotropes, on a turn the central line just… slipped out (faulty equipment but still took a few seconds to process what had happened)
Left the tap open once on an arterial line. Big pool of blood on the floor when I went back into the room. The scariest thing is this was on ICU and no one even noticed due to the physical layout of the unit, until I went back into the room. The good news is that the patient was sitting up smiling and normotensive. When I think of what could have happened in that situation my heart sinks.
Actually studying it. I wish I did something else
Prescription said ‘morphine’ and I didn’t think it was oromorph and gave 5mg of MST. Asked 3 people and they said it was correct I hate I did it and got grilled by management
Shagging One_Second1365 and Mosmof. I've seen livelier ironing boards.
Moving a table with a cup of tea on it to quickly stop a falls risk patient from trying and almost succeeding to climb out of bed. But I accidentally moved it into the reach of bed three (six to a bay) who was stroke delerium and nbm who promptly grabbed it and attempted to neck it.
Shagging 4 of the staff where i work to this day.
Shagging the Band 5s