Hello fellow Nurse, this is your weekly handoff. Some quick and dirty nursing news that’s worth sharing. Enjoy!

Something to absolutely not believe

Four people went into Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown in Nashville on August 14th for routine joint replacements and were injected with potassium phosphate instead of their spinal anesthetic. At least two are now paralyzed and another is in intensive care. The hospital says a pharmacy error sent the wrong drug to the OR, and the safeguards it announced afterward — isolated storage for high-alert meds, a hard stop when a spinal medication scan alerts, an independent double check by a second pharmacist — are things most of us assumed were already standard everywhere. Then came the detail that made every nurse’s stomach drop: the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has opened a criminal case. Same city that prosecuted RaDonda Vaught.

Something to make you furious

A bipartisan bill reintroduced on August 6th would finally make it illegal for Medicare-participating facilities to force a nurse to stay past the end of a scheduled shift, work more than 48 hours in a week, or run more than 12 consecutive hours. Read that again and sit with the fact that it’s 2026 and this requires an act of Congress. Pilots, truckers, and merchant mariners have had work-hour limits since the 1930s — meanwhile 32 states still have nothing on the books protecting nurses from mandated overtime. The bill also adds anti-retaliation language, because right now saying no to a mandate can get you written up, fired, or reported to your board as an abandonment risk. An earlier version of this exact bill died quietly in committee in 2024, so hold the applause.

Something to make us nurses proud

Meghan Collins, an ICU nurse at Brigham and Women’s, spent about twenty minutes on the witness stand in the Lindsay Clancy trial and accidentally became the best PR our profession has had in years. She testified only to what she observed and charted — sedation, delirium, restraints, a documented request to change a healthcare proxy — and when a question went past her scope, she said so. The line that broke containment on nursing social media: “I do not diagnose.” Three years after that admission she couldn’t possibly have remembered a single shift, but her charting remembered it for her, and it held up under cross from both sides. Millions of people who have never once thought about what nurses document watched one of us hold the line under maximum pressure, and honestly? Chef’s kiss.

Something from a Subscriber

“Twenty-two years on nights and I still think the best save I ever made had nothing to do with a code. We had a gentleman on our unit who hadn’t spoken a full sentence in four days — wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t look at anybody, just stared at the ceiling and let us do our thing. Everybody had a theory. Depression. Delirium. New med. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were all charting around something instead of at it.

So at 0300 I pulled up a chair and asked him what he did before he retired. Turns out he was a machinist for thirty-one years, and he’d been trying to tell us since admission that he couldn’t hear a word we were saying, because his hearing aids were sitting in a drawer at home. Four days. Four days of us talking louder and slower at a man who just needed his batteries. His daughter brought them in the next morning, he ate an entire tray, and he told me a joke I absolutely cannot repeat in a newsletter.

I think about that shift every time I catch myself about to chart ‘noncompliant.’ Sometimes the intervention isn’t in the order set. Sometimes it’s a chair, three in the morning, and actually asking.”

— Denise, Med-Surg RN, Michigan

We want to hear more from you! Submit your funniest or strangest or most heart warming nursing stories and we will pick one to share every week! This will be shared anonymously- so don’t be afraid to add some humor and flare and cursing, just like we love here!

Please submit all stories to: [email protected]

Please be conscious of HIPAA and omit any PPI or detail that may give hints to the people, hospital, and nurses involved in your story. We may slightly alter your story or change names for this reason. Your story may also be shortened and slightly altered to fit the size of the blog. Happy writing!!

If you liked this newsletter please share with your friends. Which bullet is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Email me and let me know. 1f6