The Sixth Floor

2002-10-27 - 3:58 p.m.

It's been busy all day, but at around 3:30 it suddenly became not very busy at all. I'm watching both the Niners and the Patriots on ESPN.com, but this is certainly not a very exciting way to watch football. The world series game comes on at 5. I guess I'll get that going when it starts. By then football will be over anyway.

Oh man, three and a half hours to go until it's time to go home. I worked today in the 6th floor pharmacy. I like it better than the 8th floor where I used to work. I like the way the pharmacists are more centrally located so I have a better idea of what's actually going on. I just got a phone call from an irate nurse. Apparently she's been having difficulty getting a rifampin IV for a patient. I don't know what the problem was yesterday, but I was able to determine that the problem today was secondary to a goof by a pharmacist here. However, that pharmacist was not me. Oh well, getting yelled at by nurses is part of being an inpatient pharmacist. I know that we shouldn't ever miss things, but working in a 400-bed hospital, sometimes things slip through the cracks. If I could figure out a system where things wouldn't slip through the cracks, I'd be a hero in the pharmacy world. I think maybe the best way to do that would be to allow physician order entry. But if you've seen the wacky orders that come across my fax machine, you know that some sort of pharmacist review of orders prior to the dose being received by a patient, is absolutely essential.

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Ok, twenty minutes left until the end of the day and I'm discovering the downside of the 6th floor pharmacy. It closes. That means that there is no night shift, which means no one comes in to relieve us, which means we have to stay 'til closing. Sixteen minutes to go...