Review the electronic health record For each nursing action, click to specify if the action occurred correctly or occurred incorrectly.
Explanation & Rationale
This question evaluates nursing prioritization and adherence to provider orders in a client with acute decompensated heart failure. The client presents with pulmonary congestion, hypoxia, peripheral edema, and elevated NT-pro-BNP, indicating fluid overload and worsening cardiac function. Management focuses on improving oxygenation, reducing preload with diuretics, and ensuring timely communication with the healthcare team. Evaluation of interventions requires comparing documentation against expected standards of heart failure care. Rationale: • Elevated head of bed: Raising the head of the bed is an appropriate intervention to improve lung expansion and reduce venous return in a client with heart failure. This position helps relieve dyspnea and orthopnea by decreasing pulmonary congestion. It is a standard non-pharmacologic intervention for improving oxygenation in fluid overload states. Therefore, this action was appropriately implemented. • Elimination method: Assisting the client to a bedside commode is appropriate because it promotes safety while allowing monitoring of urine output in a heart failure client receiving diuretics. The documented output of 200 mL clear urine also indicates diuretic effectiveness. Encouraging safe elimination supports fluid balance assessment. • Furosemide administration: The medication was ordered at 0700 but not administered until 1435 (over 7 hours later). While the nurse paged the IV team, furosemide is critical for unloading the fluid in heart failure. A delay of this length is incorrect for an acute exacerbation. • Removed infiltrated IV: The documentation indicates the IV was infiltrated and could not be restarted, but does not clearly show proper removal and management of the infiltrated site before repeated failed attempts. Standard care requires immediate discontinuation of an infiltrated IV to prevent tissue injury and prompt establishment of new access. • Timing of oxygen administration: The provider order specifies oxygen should be initiated to maintain oxygen saturation above 92%, yet oxygen was not started until 1435 despite documented saturations dropping to 90–91% earlier. This delay indicates a failure to initiate timely oxygen therapy when hypoxia was already present. In heart failure, early oxygen delivery is critical to prevent worsening respiratory distress. Therefore, oxygen administration was not initiated at the appropriate time. • Cardiologist notification: The 0820 note confirms that "Cardiology notified of admission," which was explicitly required by the provider's orders. The nurses notes at 0820 confirms that this is the time the patient was being admitted, and in this same note the cardiologist being notified is also documented.