Steady My Heart.

This post initially featured on Britain's Nurses for STNBC : Just another pondering from my recent experience at the other end of the stethoscope. A couple of times a day there are the drug rounds: morning, lunch, dinner, bedtime or thereabouts. The nurses go from patient to patient dishing out the drugs that have been prescribed for that time. A system I'm sure works well, most of the time, or at least some of the time. However, what about the patients with multiple long term conditions, those with polypharmacy and a set routine at home? I am great at managing my medication (when I'm not being stubborn), I have a multi-coloured dosette box that I fill at the beginning of the week. It's great. I can identify each of my medications just by looking at it, tell you what I take it for, the dosage, and when it should be taken. So shouldn't we be giving expert patients more autonomy over their "usual" medications even when they're an inpatient...

Recently, I was unfortunately poorly enough to see life from the other end of the hospital bed. I was poorly with sepsis but due to my pre-existing condition (POTS) I was automatically a "falls risk". POTS means I am more prone to fainting than your average 22 year old, even more so when I'm poorly. However, being categorised as a falls risk would possibly have been hugely detrimental to my recovery had I not been very well educated abut autonomic dysfunction and how quickly I would become deconditioned. During my 8 days on the ward, I had plenty of time to mull over attitudes to inpatient falls. Where I work falls are seen as a very bad thing . Our morning meeting involves a reminder of how many days since our last fall and how many we've had that month. As HCA's we've had various training sessions on falls prevention and are given frequent reminders to declutter bed spaces and make sure we're doing all we can to prevent falls. We often have bays where ...