Re: Poor Nursing or typical Employees? What would you do?
OK, here is the scoop. I work in a large hospital, I don't involves in patient care but I do see that kind of stuff many times. There are nurses and there are nurse's aide, also may known as certified nursing aide, personal needs tech, patient care tech. The nurses job is to administer drugs, start/stop i.v, determine the neccessary drug for the patient and then consult the doctor about it and give what the doctor prescribed. The aides are the one that does the majority of the cares such as getting the patient out of bed to go to the bathroom. Help patient get out of bed and into chair and back. Changing the patient gown, bed spreads, and wipe their behind after they peed and pooped on the bed, passing out and collects the food tray, feed the patient if they can't feed themselve, giving bath. Basically, all the dirty jobs and everything that a patient needs help with or refused to do because they know they can get the aides to do it for them. Not all patients are totally dependent but quite a few who are once they become hospitalized even though they lived at home alone and took care of themselve while at home. The aides are normally assigned up to 8 patients to their care. Naturally, some patient will have to wait while the assigned aide are taking care of other patient. This is especially true for MedSurg unit and non critical areas which was mostly likely where your MIL was at. The nurses most of the time will ignore nurse call light and patient cry for help because "it's not their job" even though they are not busy and standing around bs..ing. Not all nurse are like that, some of them will at least go into the room and see what the patient needed and go tell the aide and some of them will even go ahead and do it if they are not busy. If I were you JRJ, I will go directly to the administration and tell them what happened. Do not tell the charge nurse or the dept. nurse manager, your concern probably will not be taken care of. If your MIL was in dire need and they were just standing around ignoring her is totally unacceptable for any hospital standard.
