Happy Nurse's Week

The SEIU folks have some e-cards you can send to your favorite nurse or yourself at their Value Care, Value Nurses website. It's an interesting site even if you don't use the cards.

Med Doc brought in Krispy Kremes for us, and I can honestly say I've never in my life had a FRESH Krispy Kreme before today. OMG. I always thought they tasted a bit like wonder bread with sugar water poured on them, but a FERSH one, now that's a whole 'nuther story!. I was good - I only had one. Psych Doc brought out a box of mint chocolate wafer cookies. I guess they like us fat-n-happy. :)

Speaking of fat-n-happy, I went to my first pharm dinner last night. It was at a very nice restaurant downtown, and I got to dress up for a change. They had great food, a real round-table sort of presentation, group discussion about issues within continuity of care in newly stabilized patients, and an impressive guest list from all over our not-so-small town. I was impressed. Everyone kept saying how this was so different from other pharm dinners (meaning interesting) and I think it was very important for so many parts of the whole patient care picture to come together to find ways of making it easier to help patients stay on track. Being new to the whole thing myself I thought I would keep quiet - but I couldn't help but join in on the brainstorming! We broke down into our individual tables (about 8-10 people each) and got out boards and worked on coming up with reasons why it's difficult for patients to follow up after hospitalization with outpatient medications(with some emphasis on Risperdal Consta). We then worked on ways to correct these problems (where possible) and then shared our findings with the group as a whole and discussed it further. Because guests came from inpt, outpt, private, and even correctional backgrounds, there was a lot of information exchanged. Anyway, I'm sure I'm going on too much about this, but I thought it was great and not at all what I'd heard about stuffy, boring, blah-blah-blah drug dinners. Nods to Janssen and Risperdal Consta for facilitating it.

Note to nursing students: Here's some info on Prolixin Decoanate, Haldol decoanate and Risperdal Consta. They're interesting IM injections you might not ever have to give unless you work in psych, but it's nice to know they exist. They serve a real purpose in a sometimes difficult patient population.