@ Asian
What about JW nurses who are told to administer a blood transfusion per doctor's orders? Can they? Would his/her conscience prevent him/her from doing so? Could they be fired for not following doctor's orders? Could they lose their nurse's license? Any nurses/ex-JW nurses here?
When I was growing up there was a nurse in my congregation. She had no issue with administering a blood transfusion, because it was the doctor ordering the transfusion.
Then again, I've come across JW nursing students more recently who refuse to administer blood transfusions or RhoGam / WinRho to Rh negative women who have just delivered babies. The fact that some will and some won't is pretty confusing for educators. The fact that the WTS has created a gray area that allows JW health care providers to impose their own beliefs on patients who accept these treatments is going to come back to haunt them eventually, imo.
Frankly, colleagues of a nurse who routinely palms off their work to other nurses is not going to have a lot of friends in the profession. Most don't have enough time in the day to get all their own work done, let alone deal with someone else's blood transfusion (which can take between 2-4 hours per unit ordered to administer, with assessments at regular intervals during the infusion, plus calling the Transfusion Medicine department to order up your units one at a time when they are needed). Also, most physicians order a minimum of 2 units of blood, because a single unit is only going to increase the patient's hemoglobin level by approximately 10 mg/L and most hospital policies indicate transfusion when the patient's hemoglobin level is less than 80 mg/L. (Normal hemoglobin levels are higher than 100 mg/L; therefore 2 units are required to bring a person's hemoglobin levels up to a barely normal level if their starting level is 79 mg/L.)
