Abstract
After 1 week of night shift in an ICU, a fatigued physician was faced with an emergency. The call for help reached him in a moment when his attention was focused on another problem. Tired and still immersed in thought, he had to manage an emergency situation where he had to concentrate on mask ventilation and at the same time prepare for reintubation. When he manually wanted to give a bolus of an analgosedative drug to the patient he accidentally manipulated the wrong infusion pump and applied a high dose of a catecholamine. Due to an immediate intervention with a vasodilating drug, further patient harm due to an excessive increase in heart rate and arterial blood pressure was prevented.
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St.Pierre, M., Hofinger, G., Buerschaper, C., Simon, R. (2011). Attention: The Focus of Consciousness. In: Crisis Management in Acute Care Settings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19700-0_8
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