Common Breaches in the Standard of Care: Monitoring and Communication - Video Lesson

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to our video series on legal and ethical issues in patient care. This video continues the discussion of common breaches to the standard of care in the areas of patient monitoring and communication among health workers. Understanding how common breaches might occur will equip you to avoid them and avoid violating the standard of care for your patients. Monitoring is another area in which breaches in the standard of care occur. Monitoring vital signs is fundamental in assessing a patient's physiological status. Regular checks can detect changes in the patient's condition. For example, a post operative patient's blood pressure starts to gradually decline. Regular monitoring would detect this drop, prompting staff to look for potential causes like internal bleeding. However, if the vital signs aren't regularly checked, or are ignored, the patient might go into shock leading to life threatening consequences. Another monitoring breach would be overlooking test results.