Comments on: Grand Roundup and Pet Peeves

By: HypnoKitten

HypnoKitten — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 03:53:17 +0000

We’ve got phones with extensions in the ICU. When someone calls, it goes to the unit sec. She checks the video monitor to see if they’re awake or busy with a test or bath or something. If they aren’t the call gets transferred into the room. If not, the patient will get a little “while you were out” sort of note. I think direct lines would be horrible – but no phones at all would be worse! Our unit secs are super-human (aren’t they all?).

By: Cara Hill

Cara Hill — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:00:36 +0000

Great blog, and amen to the family phone calls. I know exactly where you are coming from!

By: alwin

alwin — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 01:27:19 +0000

Trust me, I resemble Tom Cruise like Roseanne Barr resembles Nicole Kiddman. Heh.

We have direct lines to the patient bedside, a shortsighted indulgence to the “open intensive care unit” movement. Those phones stay unplugged, for the most part, because Grams and Gramps can’t refuse a phone call from the kids (no matter that they are exhausted) and Mr. Businessman can’t get it through his head that the chest pain he gets every time he calls work to check on things has anything to do with his stress levels and fatigue.

I usually run a baseline ST segment analysis for those who insist on making a call, then snap another shot after the conversation gets animanted. Then I show them the side-by-side, explain what was happening, and then disconnect the phone until we drop a stent into ‘em.

By: GruntDoc

GruntDoc — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:35:23 +0000

While a resident on the Trauma service, somehow I was the ‘appointed one’ to keep the families up to date on the happenings. I accepted someone elses’ advice early, and told the families I wouldn’t be talking to everyone in the family (large, caring hispanic families, with 20 people in the family each wanting an individual brief) they’d need to pick ONE PERSON who was really reliable that everyone trusted.

This only backfired on me once, when I got a family member with some sort of weird problem: no matter what I told her, she’d make up her own story and relay that to the family. Took a while to regain the trust of that family after we figured out what had happened.