Here We Go Again...

It's oncall duty time. Again. As of now, I still have 22 hrs 30 mins left of my call. Tomorrow, I'll be a free woman. No more A&E duties. No more oncalls.

I would not say this oncall duty is bad, but being oncall makes me sweat big time when you get paged to do mathematical calculations. Make no mistakes, I am good in my maths. However, I do sweat big time when I get paged at 1 AM by an ICU staff nurse to do calculation on the infusion rate because the doctor changed the dose and she did not know how to calculate the volume she needs to run per hour.

Generally, I am kinder towards the peripheral ward nurses. After all, they do not often see cardiac-related drugs run as continuous infusion with the dose titrated every few hours depending on patient's response. If they page me to do the calculation, I would not question them. However, if you are from ICU, I expect you to do the calculation yourself. Or at the very least attempt to calculate and then page to double check with me. Not blatantly ask me, "So what is the rate of infusion?"

I am really scared. My parents are still hale and hearty, but what happens when they finally succumb to old age, and they need to be warded or go to an ICU? I cannot imagine them being taken care of by the inept foreign nurses we have in our healthcare system.

I am not bashing the foreign nurses. We DO need them to plug the holes, and I know of many foreign nurses who are very competent in their job. Accents, I can get use to them, worse come to worse ask them to spell out the drug names or just triple check that the information they relay is correct. However, the less than competent ones should not even be hired in the first place, much less be placed to work in potentially high-risk areas such as the ICU. *sweat*