After ten years as a practicing clinical hospitalist, I have settled on the only rational conclusion I can think of regarding unexplainable daily weight fluctuations in the hospital: Many nurses and nurses' aides are part-time magicians. That's right folks. After seeing hundreds of patients over the years experience radical increases or decreases in their daily weight measurement despite negative ins-and-outs, I have no other rational conclusion but to assume many nurses and aides are incredible magicians just waiting to get their big break in the up-and-coming genre of hospital magic.
Got congestive heart failure and the need for accurate I/Os and daily weights? Got severe sepsis requiring liters upon liters of fluid? Got a hospitalist who orders daily I/Os for no good reason at all? Then accurate weights are necessary to make quality medical decisions. While obtaining daily weights may seem simple to the untrained eye, the process actually requires hours of additional training to be certified as an expert weight taker. Some hospitals even have bulletin reminders for their staff on how to obtain accurate daily weights. Here is one example below of a hospital's daily weight protocol sent to me by a reader.
Weighing patients is easy. I know for a fact that many patients enter the hospital with magical expectations. When I tell them we have a magic force field that surrounds our hospital walls, they are in ah of our power. When it comes to erratic daily weight measurements that makes no clinical sense, nursing magic is the only plausible explanation I have, as this original Happy Hospitalist nursing ecard below describes.
"How to weigh a patient: If you need directions on how to weight a patient, you are not smart enough to be working at our hospital."
"And for my next magic trick, I will make you gain five pounds over night on your daily weights despite your negative ins and outs."
Got congestive heart failure and the need for accurate I/Os and daily weights? Got severe sepsis requiring liters upon liters of fluid? Got a hospitalist who orders daily I/Os for no good reason at all? Then accurate weights are necessary to make quality medical decisions. While obtaining daily weights may seem simple to the untrained eye, the process actually requires hours of additional training to be certified as an expert weight taker. Some hospitals even have bulletin reminders for their staff on how to obtain accurate daily weights. Here is one example below of a hospital's daily weight protocol sent to me by a reader.
Weighing patients is easy. I know for a fact that many patients enter the hospital with magical expectations. When I tell them we have a magic force field that surrounds our hospital walls, they are in ah of our power. When it comes to erratic daily weight measurements that makes no clinical sense, nursing magic is the only plausible explanation I have, as this original Happy Hospitalist nursing ecard below describes.
"How to weigh a patient: If you need directions on how to weight a patient, you are not smart enough to be working at our hospital."
"And for my next magic trick, I will make you gain five pounds over night on your daily weights despite your negative ins and outs."
This post is for entertainment purposes only and likely contains humor only understood by those in a healthcare profession. Read at your own risk.
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