My dad was recently released from a month in the hospital and rehab facilities. My dad has a brain tumor and was admitted for seizures two months ago. His seizures were unusual. Because of the location of the tumor, they were hard to detect unless you knew what to look for: confusion, facial droop, and right-side mobility limitations. While my dad’s medical care overall was very good, multiple times during his stay he had seizures that went undetected by nurses even though they saw him during the seizures. Their oversight was not intentional, but it was frustrating nonetheless. 

I began to realize that I could predict which nurses would be on top of my father’s care and detect his seizures and which nurses would miss the seizures. A simple whiteboard with the patient’s name, the date, the patient’s diagnosis, and the names of the hospital staff adorns every hospital and rehab room. Every three or four days the staff wouldn’t update the whiteboard. I would walk in on a Friday and it would say “Thursday.”

Changing the whiteboard is simple. It doesn’t take the nurse more than a minute and you wouldn’t think that it has much to do with a nurse’s competence. But the whiteboard was the canary in the coal mine for the level of care my father was receiving. Because attentiveness and details matter in medical care. A nurse who doesn’t pay close attention to a whiteboard doesn’t pay close attention to a patient.