Module 5 blog--clinical decision making

How did the readings influence your perception of your own clinical decision-making?
The readings made me think a lot about how I make decisions. In the NICU we have a system called CPG- clinical support guidelines. Each month we were supposed to review new entries to the system and be aware of the information provided there. It probably took over a year for me to realize that this was a valuable tool. Occasionally we are asked to do procedures that we don’t do often, and thus we forget the exact procedure to follow to do it correctly. One such task is administering blood products. If we have not done it in a while we may be unsure how often and for how long we need to do frequent vital signs. By utilizing the CPG it can give us the information we need in a reliable way. This became clear to me one day as I set up to administer a blood transfusion to one of my patients. There had been some changes in the vital sign recording requirements in the past few months and I wasn’t quite sure what the changes had ended up being. I asked a few of my colleagues and everyone gave me a slightly different answer. They differed on how many at 15 minute intervals versus how many at 30 minute intervals. Finally one colleague said hey let’s look it up on CPG—what a novel idea! We looked it up and got the correct information which I shared with my coworkers and then administered the blood and correctly recorded the vital signs at the correct intervals. After this incident I frequently consulted CPG even when I was really sure about the correct procedure to do a task. If there is one thing that I have found it is things are always changing in health care and it never hurts to double check. Especially when you are working with premature babies and the cost of an error could mean a life.