Here’s a daunting question:

Is the convenience of taking a verbal order worth your nursing license?

When you practice nursing, you kind of have to look at each patient as a legal liability for yourself. At least that is what you are advised to do from the very beginning. Every order that isn’t written correctly, or doesn’t make sense has the potential for turning into a liability for your license. That is why nurses document the crap out of everything, and that is why our motto is, “CYA.”

So in the ICU, you typically have two patients. In the recovery room you might have 10-15 patients (or more) in one day. So does that mean your legal liability goes up accordingly? Not exactly. The ICU patients are much more sick and you are completing many more orders per patient, so most likely it equals out.

But this is the part that scares me. Part of a nurse’s job is to make sure the doctor’s orders are written correctly. In the ICU this is a lot easier. In the recovery room it’s not. I get really tired having to remind the MDs to write a “discharge to home” order. It’s usually pretty obvious that the patient is going home, yet if the doc doesn’t write for it, and I send them home and something bad happens, I am potentially liable.

It seems like I carry out tons of verbal orders in the recovery room, and the physicians rarely cosign these orders. So from a legal point of view, it’s like the order never happened.

A minor annoyance? Not really. It’s actually one of the reasons I am considering leaving nursing, because if a physician is too busy to write or cosign an order, and I have carried it out, my license is on the line, and I’m not cool with that.