Hi Guys
Whilst on my ortho inpatients clinic one of my patients had had a bilateral TKR, he had had a troponin rise and therefore instructions from the medical team were not to get him out of bed. Unfortunatley the patient had not been informed of this troponin rise or its implications by the doctors. When i went to go and treat him he beccame quite upset at me and was asking why he hadnt been up out of bed and if i knew what i was doing. I almost opened my mouth and told him he hadnt gotten out of bed due to his troponin rise however luckily i didnt as my supervisor arrived, and explained to me that i am not in a position to tell the patient that, and it has to come from the RMO. However this patients blood pressure was going through the roof as he had worked himself into such a state as to why he wasnt getting out of bed.
This situation was resolved by paging the RMO and getting him to come down and explain the situation to the patient. However i hope the RMO realised that by not informing the patient of his change in condition, that the patient became highly stressed and anxious which probably put even more strain in his heart. If i was in this situation again, i would follow the same actions. I never knew before this situation that we werent allowed to disclose certain things to the patient unless the doctors had told them first and this is what i learnt from this situation
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1 comment:
Hi Rach,
Thanks for sharing this one - that legality (or whatever you want to call it) was never explained to me, and not being aware of this, there may well have been a situation where I have disclosed information to a patient in situations similar to yours (where the patient wants an explanation as to why they can't do something). I will certainly check in the future!
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