Topics of note

Here are a few items I've encountered in my day-to-day practice and some related articles.

Oral care
How many of you out there really know if your patients brush their teeth? For a lot of SCI patients, if the nurses don't do it, patients don't get their teeth brushed. Reuters Health ran an interesting article in the past week about the relationship between oral hygiene and pneumonia. It's not just associated with ventilators anymore, folks.

Devices and other goodies
On our unit, we have lots of people with Baclofen pumps. Baclofen pumps are wonderful things that can get a patient who's in what looks like a permanent fetal position back to the straight and narrow, so he or she can ride in their wheelchair and do lots of other normal things we take for granted.

One of our patients who came in this week has an interesting variant: he has a baclofen/morphine pump that delivers both drugs intrathecally.

Bugs!
A recent patient came in and screened positive for a UTI. The culprit: E coli, which according to Todar's Online Textbook of Bacteriology is responsible for 90% of UTIs. This same patient has a history of odd bugs, including Kocuria Kristinae.

When RNs are left to their own devices...

Some of us start doing homework! Yes, that's right. Since many of our current continuing education items are now in the VA's much-vaunted LMS system (learning management system), we're playing catch-up whenever there is a free moment.


I did my required items recently, so I helped my coworkers to log into the system. It's amazing how people complain about the system not working, especially when they won't read the startup instructions.

Besides the goodies in LMS, we often have educators drop off sheets to read on our lunchroom table. Once you unearth them from the hubris, you can get those learning items done, too. One of our recent ones was about a new feeding pump, which had a very nice DVD, which I just popped in one of the PCs and watched the other night.

Outside of those learning activities, I decided to check out a few other things when I had a spare moment. Stay tuned and I'll have more goodies later this week!