Observations and Assessments
Notions to small for a blog post, all in one place. You need to take your pain medication. Once upon a time, TorontoEmerg had some fairly significant surgery on a…
emergency department
A Letter to a Younger Colleague
Dear Colleague You are fairly new to our Emergency Department, you have done your Emergency Nursing courses and you now have collected a slew of certification initials: ACLS, PALS, TNCC,…
Shi(f)t Work
Wanderer over at Lost on the Floor makes a point: My manager remarked to me that night-shifters tend to, “have a bit of chip on our shoulders, almost like the…
So When Does This Become a Crisis?
I walked into the Emergency Department one hot morning a couple of weeks ago and found every last stretcher — twenty-five beds, including the two we try to reserve for…
Flattery Will Get You Everywhere
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Team TorontoEmerg. First, I’ve been working like a rented mule, and secondly, a colleague whom I trusted and respected sandbagged me with…
Hotocalypse
Hot enough for ya? For you non-metric types, that 38C is an even 100F. I think I speak for most of my fellow Canadians when I say, “WTF?” I suppose…
Get Me the Frickin’ Goat!
If only there was a magic goat. Part of an advertising campaign from the Nova Scotia Ministry of Health Promotion and Protection aimed at reducing harm from high risk behaviours.…
Triage
The world in four patients, plus interruptions. Who’s next? Come in. Do you have your Health Card? Take off your hoodie and sit down. What brings you in today? Where…
The Most Useless Form on the Planet
Imagine this: you’ve had the shift from hell, no beds, every other patient is moments away from seeing Jesus/Allah/Buddha and to top it off, the department is down three nurses,…
How to Clear Out a Waiting Room
A couple of weeks ago we had a spectacularly bad day, traumas, codes, STEMIs, septic shock, status asthmaticus, what have you, plus (of course) a department filled with the haunted…
Bad Nurse! Bad!
I guess my venting, raging post the other day offended and/or ticked some people off, or at least the use of the strong language did. No sooner had I posted…
In Which I Swear, Repeatedly, or, TorontoEmerg Gets Bullied
I write this blog for a number of reasons: my own amusement, to educate, to share various random thoughts, to tell stories, to stimulate discussion on topics important to nursing,…
Don’t Tell Your Patient This. Or That.
Jo over at Head Nurse had an interesting question about a month ago. She was prepping for an interview for a Reader’s Digest article called “50 Things Your Nurse Won’t…