Tasha Reevs, RN, spotted a problem and that led to critical help for a patient in need.
A critical and subtle neurological symptom was caught because a perceptive resource pool nurse had taken care of a patient as she moved to a different unit in the hospital and noticed a change others had missed.
Tasha Reevs, RN, cared for the patient in the Logan Regional Hospital ICU and knew her baseline mental status from working with her there. A few weeks later, Tasha was assigned to work with the same patient in a different unit. As Tasha started her shift, she noticed the patient was very fatigued. Throughout the first few hours of her shift, the patient was persistently complaining of being tired and needed much more rest and sleep than Tasha thought was normal. Previous caregivers who’d cared for the patient hadn’t been concerned, but Tasha couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong.
“When I first saw the patient, I just thought she was super tired and needed some time to wake up,” Tasha says. “We all have those mornings sometimes. She was also recovering from COVID and we know the toll that virus can take on our bodies.”
Tasha helped the patient with her breakfast order, then let her go back to sleep. But when breakfast came, the patient was still lethargic, drowsy, and barely coherent.
“At this moment I just had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right,” Tasha says. “I knew I needed to contact the doctor especially because when I’d taken care of her previously, she was awake and alert and a totally different patient.”
Tasha used the error prevention technique Stop and Resolve to stop and voice her concern to the patient’s physician, David Faux, MD. She told Dr. Faux the patient wasn’t this fatigued while she was in the ICU and she worried something more was going on. He agreed to order some tests, which revealed the patient had a bleed in her brain.
“Waiting for that CT result felt like a lifetime,” Tasha says. “When we got that call that it was a brain bleed, I seriously just stood there. I was shocked. I’d never had this situation happen before.”
Tasha, Dr. Faux, and two other nurses quickly got the patient down to the emergency department and she was later transferred to McKay-Dee Hospital via ambulance.
“I can’t say this enough, I’m just super grateful that I was able to take care of her on another unit,” Tasha says. “This helped me to realize something wasn’t right and we got her the care she needed right away.”
“We’re lucky Tasha had this patient in the ICU and recognized and reported her concerns and she cared for her throughout the hospital,” says ShaLee Snyder, RN, shared leader for the north resource pool. “Tasha is a wonderful nurse and an asset to our resource pool team.”