Oops!
-
- June
- 17
My father is in a rehab facility/nursing home for about a week. He’s on a lot of medication, and there’s one drug in particular that is essential.
On Friday, at about 4:30, I realized nobody had come in to give the medication. I ran to ask the nurse. She checked the log and her eyes widened. “Oops,’’ she said.
“Oops?” I asked. “Are you serious? He missed his 12 noon dose?”
Long story short, it turns out the previous nurse had totally forgotten about the medicine. I ran down to the nursing supervisor, who telephoned the forgetful nurse at home and gently chided her for being negligent.
“We’ll talk about this Monday,’’ she said to the nurse, in what I thought was too nice a tone.After I raised a bit of a fuss, the supervisor reassured me that everything would be okay, and she paged the doctor just to make sure.
But still…if I hadn’t noticed that somebody had screwed up, would the nurses ever had caught the error?
Do people really need advocates in nursing homes and hospitals just to assure their own safety? How awful is that?
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:14 pm by Linda Lombroso.
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Baby boomer Linda Lombroso was born in Queens and grew up in Port Washington. She began her journalism career at New York Magazine and Rolling Stone, but left to pursue a master's degree in elementary education. Shortly afterward, she returned to magazines as an editor at US magazine, but again left the field, this time for the birth of her first child. Linda and her family moved from Manhattan to New Rochelle in 1988. After spending 10 years as a stay-at-home mother, she joined The Journal News as a police reporter in 1997. She's been a Life & Style writer since 2000. This is the only year her three children are teenagers at the same time, which means she undergoes a daily critique of hair, makeup and wardrobe. Her parents still live in Port Washington Ń and they like everything she wears.
Recently in the ICU for 3 days at a community hospital in an upscale Westchester community. At times, I was made to feel that I was interrupting the nurses when I needed them. My monitor would be beeping for 1/2 hour or more before someone stepped in behind the curtain to see what was wrong. No one answered the nurse button on the side of my bed no matter how many times I rang it. Even the doctor who performed the emergency room care couldn’t find the nurses when they came up to see me. I was the communication conduit that informed the nurse of the doctor’s orders. I didn’t get served any food until my last day in the hospital, though I had asked to be placed on the meal delivery. (I’m sure 9 meals will show up on the hospital bill.)
My “neighbors” on either side of my room were unconscious and on respirators, so they had no complaints.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Hospitals are big business and any notions of altruistic motives is naive. The night nurses voluntarily “cover” for each other so that there are fewer nurses on the floor. Be particularly wary of night time hospital duty. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit to discover that night time mortality rates correlate highly with night shifts.
Stay with your dad and if you can’t, get someone to be a conscious body in the room so some hollering can occur if need be. There MUST be a patient advocate present at all times. And I’m sure this is true no matter which hospital you go to.