Assignment: Transurethral Prostate Resection

Assignment: Transurethral Prostate Resection

Professional Development Exercises :

Read the case study presented at the end of Chapter 9 (Guido, p. 185-186).
he patient, on the first day postoperative for a transurethral prostate resection, received a unit of packed cells early in the morning on the supposition that he was bleeding internally. That afternoon at 3:22 p.m., the patient’s wife informed the nurse that her husband was breathing “heavily” and requested that the nurse assess him. The nurse, according to the testimony of the wife, informed her that the doctor was aware of the patient’s breathing pattern and that there was nothing about which she should worry. The nurse did not leave the nursing station. The patient subsequently died
related to a shock from the internal bleeding complicated by a reaction to the blood transfusion. In court some years later, this same nurse testified that she had called the surgeon immediately to report that the patient’s respirations were 50, that she had taken vital signs that were within the normal limits for this patient, and that she had obtained a pulse oximeter reading that was acceptable. She also testified that she kept calling the physician’s office to report these findings. None of this nursing care was documented in the progress notes that the patient’s nurse placed in the patient’s chart the next day. The nurse testified that she had compiled the progress notes from scratch notes she had written during the previous afternoon. The nurse further testified that it was her practice to make handwritten notes during the time that she worked and then to type her progress notes on the hospital system the next day. Additionally, this nurse never documented taking vital signs during the critical 2 hours between the spike in the patient’s respirations and the time he was pronounced. T he surgeon’s office nurse testified that a call was received from the hospital at 4:00 p.m. and that the surgeon immediately left the office for the hospital. The surgeon testified that he called the hospital from his car phone and that he immediately called a code as soon as he reached the patient’s room.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.