RASS Revisited

 
As the years go by every medical worker must go to hospital orientations or get introduced to new solutions, blah, blah, blah. Man, a huge amount of money is blown on these things and no matter who you work for they will sell it like it's a new pathway to Jesus. 

The one and only………..(no, I’m joking, there are at least fifty of these ridiculous acronym directives that are jammed down our throats). And believe me when I tell you, the primary objective is to audit your performance, while the secondary objective is to guide a metric for billing. 

Here is one of my all-time despised directives:

Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale.

Never in my career, in any Nurse-to-Nurse report did Betty Lou say to me, Patient Billybob has a RASS of minus two, positive. Instead, I was told that; Billybob is totally whacked out, slugging and spitting at his caregivers between bouts of profound somnolence and manic, murderous mayhem. And incidentally, I told the Doctor the same thing. 

So why is there a RASS? To audit us, of course, you fool! It probably fits in somewhere on that down-home favorite, the APACHE score.

RASS

Remember
Acquire
Stupid 
Stuff,
As if we didn’t
Have to do enough.

Always remember
To do that RASS, mutt,
Or some invisible Auditor
Will kick your butt.

At first there was AIDET
And then there was NO PASS,
Ask any honest nurse
They’re all a pain in the ass,
And don’t forget that Apache Score
One more shackle
To grapple with on your shift,
I doubt the CEO must do it
Do you get my drift?

Is management forced
To use precious time?
To pull up Apache
And make everything rhyme,
A non-productive part
Amidst every day duty?
Makes me feel like calling
Death Cab For Cutie.

2007.......2021