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Transcript: Emmily Cox, nurse at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane
Just moving onto my shift... So, once I’ve worked out what patients we’re going to look after, we then move on with most of our patients having their vital obs[ervations] taken, just to make sure they’re all within their ranges. Once we’ve done that, some of our patients may [require] some medication straight away, as our main thing for our patients is pain. So we do have to make sure that patients have adequate pain medication on board so they can actually rehab and get on with their physiotherapies they have during the day. As it’s generally a night shift, we will then move onto checking their catheter bags, because all of patients will have a catheter in because they’re obviously unable to go to the toilet themselves. So, we’re just making sure they’re actually draining.
Part of one of our main things with [the] spinal injuries unit is they have a condition called autonomic dysreflexia. That’s a life-threatening complication of their injuries if they’re a C5 or lower. So, with the spinal patients, they all get categorized depending on their level of injury. This is a condition that is, like I said, life-threatening. So with doing their obs, we need to make sure that they’re within their ranges, because if they’re complaining of a headache or their blood pressure is extremely high, we need to act really quickly and nine times out of ten you will have a patient each shift who actually has this condition. That involves getting them some mediation very quickly, getting them positioned differently, and you need to get a lot of doctors down to come and administer different medications that we don’t on the ward.
Once this is all done, most of our patients are also requiring, generally overnight, second hourly pressure-area cares. So that involves having to roll them side to side to alleviate the pressure that they’re lying on, because they’re really susceptible to pressure injuries, as they can’t feel their own skin. So that causes a lot of problems, and unfortunately, no matter how much pressure-area care you do, they will nine times out of ten get a pressure area of some sort to some level.