I probably already know the answer, I just want to get other nurses opinions.
I work in high risk pregnancy, and we have a MA. We recently switched to EMR and now it’s easier to track things. It’s our clinic policy to check the first BP with the vital sign machine, and any elevated BPs get rechecked manually. It was brought to my attention by other medical staff that this MA (who is exceptionally lazy) has been checking all BPs manually and documenting false BPs/never documenting elevated BPs. Some days every patient will have the same BP/same systolic/same diastolic/obviously incorrect. So I (the nurse) asked her to start using the machine and she said she would but just hasn’t. I started going behind her and rechecking and sure enough, all of her documented BPs are wrong. I suspect it’s because she doesn’t want to pause TikTok to go recheck the elevated ones but that’s just speculation. We have a few patients that went to L&D to be diagnosed with pre-e, had elevated BPs at home and their OB office but magically had completely normal BPs in our office every time. The patients were even starting to question things.
So I notified my supervisors (we have several) and started documenting all of this. I sent all of my documentation to them via email and……crickets. To me, this is a huge patient safety issue and management refuses to address it at all. I’ve even brought it up to my providers who have also talked to management about it and still, nothing. My clinic is part of a larger healthcare organization so I’m wondering if I should just wait on management to finally make a decision or if I should escalate it to HR?
ETA: thanks for your opinions everyone! I was hoping I wasn’t just overreacting. I will be making an ethics report when I go back to work.