Tess - you know I've made plenty of errors - you've read enough of my posts to know them.
I'm not surprised the resident got chewed out. I'm assuming you're referring to a medical resident. They need to function as if there is no double check - that's their job and medicine has a different "culture" than we do. As a resident, that person has had years of rf dosing, particularly if its a nephrology resident!
We are the double check & you missed it. Good job owning up to it. Now, the hard part is to figure out why it happened to you. That's always the key lesson in any error - figuring out why it occurred. I can guess - your mind is occupied with other stuff (pyxis perhaps?), fatigue, distraction... You may not be able to identify the factors while you're still emotionally tied to the fact you made a significant error.
Let yourself be depressed today. It will help you (at least it did me) to follow the patient closely so you can know how much the dose error affected the physiology or morbidity of the pt. It will also help to have someone to talk to - you have an advantage of having an SO that knows the business - so talk about it. Did you write up an incident report? I hope so - thats a way to methodically put down what exactly happened & its important for a variety of reasons.
In my institution, we developed a quarterly departmental M&M meeting to discuss our errors. We found that learning from each other helped us to prevent the factors which cause the errors.
Altho you won't make this same mistake, you will make another. It happens. Do what you can to heal yourself & go back tomorrow & start fresh.
Good luck!
