To think NHS do gooders need to realise that the patient is not always right

[oggieogggie]

I've had a right few weeks of it. I'm an auxilliary nurse and my morning normally starts by taking breakfasts around the ward. Picture the scene if you will - a trolley full of cereal, bowls and milk and a pot of hot porridge.

I walk into room one = "would you like breakfast this morning?" patient (full mental capacity) says "well before all that I'd like you to fix my TV. I cant get the channel to turn over." I say "well I'll see to that after breakfast, would you like some cereal?" he says "not until my TV is fixed ... can't you just do it, it will only take a minute (so everyone else should wait until YOUR TV is functioning before they get their breakfast and you don't see that as selfish at all?) I don't say this - I remain professional.

Imagine a few more patients who decide that their TV/Slippers/Laptop chargers etc are more important and then the unfortunate patients who receive cold porridge as a result -

Next I take a tray of hot toast around = One patient demands "I want it buttering and cutting into thin strips." I explain that she will either have to press the buzzer for someone else to come and do it or wait until I have finished delivering toast before it gets cold. "But I want it NOW!" she demands. Ok, so it's fine that everyone else will receive cold toast? that's ok with you is it?

Imagine more of the same throughout the day

"I can't get my phone working!" = well I'm taking care of a rather ill patient at the moment, it will have to wait." "that's it!! I'm making a complaint!!"

"I want you to wash me." = "I will help you but you have to wash what you can yourself." = "why?? its what you get paid for!!!" no actually - I get paid to help people back to independence and to care for those who genuinely can't do it themselves ... " - "Ive had no sleep!! I want you to wash me! I can barely move I'm in so much pain!!" (well walking down the stairs for a fag 10 minutes ago must have been agony then eh?)

I'm sorry, but could it not be said that sometimes, just sometimes certain patients are not always right and that as staff members we should not live in fear of one of these people complaining that we're not jumping through hoops to keep them happy? And no I've never had a complaint against me - I do that nursey thing of taking the abuse and maintaining a smile. Just lately I can't quite shake the notion that the NHS (and Britain in general) is so bothered about political correctness and ultimate customer satisfaction that it's actually counter productive. Why are we all so polite??!

I think that NHS Staff need to accept that very scared and ill people will not always behave rationally lottie This ^!! Was certainly the case when DM was in for so long :( Then again I think anyone who had had to have 3 life saving operations within 5days (one performed at her ICU bedside because she was too ill to be moved) wouldn't be thinking right neither. ICU nurses understand the pressure and how patients are feeling though - only have to focus on either one or two patients at a time. The difference in care she received from ICU to the General ward was very telling. I'm a big supporter of the nhs but there was a couple of people who looked after DM who clearly didn't like their jobs . As a PP said I think the child to nursery ratio depiction was correct. I think this is the problem on the wards too.

well, YABU but I can totally understand why.

Those patients are just desperate and struggling but so are you and there's only so much even the most patient can take.

I couldn't handle being an auxiliary nurse if you paid me. That you guys do this voluntarily to even try and make patients lives a little bit easier is incredible and you should be very proud of yourself for giving up your time in this way. I hope it gets easier. Maybe not all the patients realise you are a volunteer.

I think there are people trapped in their jobs, if you have been in the job for years and need the money to pay the mortgage you aren't going to leave. What career change could you make after 20-30 years a nurse?

But nursing, when someone with that length of experience was first employed, was a completely different job, and so much easier in some respects. My DM was a nurse during the war and, yes, the job was exhausting and demanding but patients didn't move on at the present rate, patients were in for weeks on end, everyone knew their role and there were adequate staff.

Now nurses are too busy to be 'caring', it is more like a production line of mostly elderly ill people who aren't going to be cured, just made well enough to go home, so little satisfaction or reward. And exhausting work, physically and mentally, for staff who are ageing themselves.

Last time I was in hosp the overworked staff nurse in charge worked a 12 hour shift, but really it was 13 hours as she had handovers to do. Exhausting and unfair imo.

The first year of formal training should be as an HCA.

I think this is a bad idea, personally. Think about it - HCA's would only ever be experienced for a year. Every September there's a whole new influx of new HCA's who have no experience - a lot of them all at once. Patient care would suffer dreadfully. People already worry about changeover day with the new doctors, but imagine knowing you're going onto a ward where both the doctors and HCAs don't know what they're doing because it's everyone's first week (and the second year student nurses are on their first academic semester in university). The already over-stretched experienced workforce will be stretched even further.

It also really, really devalues the role of HCA's - lots of them are excellent at their job. Really excellent, but have no desire to become registered nurses (for lots of reasons - less paper work, more basic care, more patient contact are just a few), but suddenly they're just either failed wannabe nurses or pre-student nurses. Why would you stay in a role like that if you feel so undervalued, on all sides.

It seems like a good idea in theory, but the practicalities of it don't seem workable. The government will probably adopt it though - it's a great wheeze. Imagine instead of paying for HCA's they'll actually have to pay to work (through student loans)

I heard on the radio that at any one time over 70% of hospital patients are the very elderly. As I said upthread, a general hospital just isn't the place for them and cottage hospitals should be brought back.

When bil had cancer the nurses were falling over him because they said it was so frustrating just facing elderly people every day whose real illness was being "old".

I have jumped forward a few pages because one post jumped out at me.
'I have had patients come on the ward who say 'where is my bed, where is my tv'

Parents, not patients. Parents. Parents who arrive on the ward when their child is in surgery and say before they even say hello, ask where their TV is. Not for their child. For them. In a 'well where's my telly' way.

We show every family round, where to get drinks and where they'll be sleeping. What we don't like are parents who make their demands as soon as they walk on, it's quite confrontational. Along with 'I want a room'. Not everyone can have one, for all sorts of reasons. But it just gets our backs up a bit.

Gah, bold fail.

"nurses would do better to fight the system and insist on changes"

Horsetowater I'm literally laughing my arse off at that comment - how exactly are nurses to 'fight the system'? If they go on strike the general public lash out at them for neglecting their patients, and the Department of Health don't have the money to pay them more in any case - they'd just get in more poorly trained locums who don't give a shit.

Get a grip on reality.

If they go on strike the general public lash out at them for neglecting their patients,

Um no they don't. And if they did is that a reason to not go on strike? If they want things to change they are going to have to make it happen.

When bil had cancer the nurses were falling over him because they said it was so frustrating just facing elderly people every day whose real illness was being "old".

Really? They said that to him? They find it frustrating because people are too old? What a pants attitude.

I agree about more 'cottage hospitals' though, as long as they're not a place in which to dump the elderly.

horsetowater - That's another frustrating attitude we deal with.

If you think it's so easy for 'nurses to fight the system' is as easy as what you're saying, it would've happened by now.

Frontline staff are fighting the system every day. They don't hold the power or the purse strings. To think otherwise is naive.

If you think it's a simple task, I suggest you do your training, get a job on a ward and do it.

No? Didn't think so

I've worked as a HCA for the past 7 years, 4 years frontline A+E and the past 3 in a private hospital. I was on the ward but for the past 7 months have worked in theatre (blood, yay! gore, yay! asleep patients, double yay!)

I loved working in A+E, but we simply did not have time to spend with patients who weren't on the brink of death. Staffing numbers were so low that I was often left in charge of triage - AS A HCA - triage patient, do their bloods/cannula/ecg (easier to do myself whilst taking history rather than delegate to a qualified bank staff nurse - most couldn't do it anyway) and that would be it. No time to pop back and ask how they are, if they were feeling better

In my private hospital we have a LOT of choose and book NHS patients, around 60% I guess.

ALL patients whether NHS or Private get FREE parking, FREE TV, amazing 3 course lunch and dinner, breakfast (NHS not AS good as Private menu but still lovely), FREE wifi, their operations done by a consultant, their own room and bathroom and great staffing. Yet the NHS patients would still moan about ridiculous things. Like buzzing to ask for their tray to be removed, when they know the pantry staff will be round again "but I've finished!" etc etc.

The thing I miss about the NHS though is the elderly. I tried to spend as much time with them as possible, always asking about their family and marriage. I really do miss that.

Worked in the nhs for twelve years. I leave a week tomorrow ive had enough. I understand you op. All I hear is complaints and its not that I dont understand its just that patients are complaining about the wrong things to the wrong people. Also very very rarely come across nurses with compassion any more they are all so stressed and ground down if its not the patients shouting at them its the managers. Unpaid overtime, thankless work and neglecting your own family to go to a job where you get bitched at all day and its absolutely impossible to complete tasks and provide the care that yes you actually do want to provide! I actually do care! I actually do wish I had time to help with all the little things that mean a patient is comfertable in what is more than likely a stressful and worrying time. But it is impossible and the state of affairs means that people like me and probably this op actually end up leaving a job we went in to because we wanted to make a difference and we wanted to care. But with management, executives and the money being whittled away on external consultancy and employing managers, trackers, paper shufflers, to meet government targets instead of being spent on providing the hands on care we have no chance. Decent staff are ground down until they cant take anymore. You have absolutely no idea what goes on behind the scenes in a hospital and I cant take it anymore. You get shit all over if you give a ball crap! The only people who are going to be able to stomach working in the nhs in ten years will all be psychopathic abusers and narcissistic ass holes. Any decent human being just cant take it. It makes me physically ill every day and its because I actually care...how stupid is that! Listen trusts spend millions of pounds on private companies. The pot is full not empty! They only put a tiny amount of their budget into patient care but trusts are raking in million plus surplus and then get a big bonus for doing so and that money goes straight back into the private sector! Its being sold under your noses and purposefully run into the ground so that everyone complains until the nhs is no more. Thats what mr I want my tv or mrs cant eat cold toast doesnt realise

I've never been incapacitated in hospital without an advocate and helper there for most of the day, and I live in fear of ever being admitted to hospital where that isn't possible. After c section last month, if dh hadn't come in at 8am, I'd have wet the bed. Nobody available and willing to help me get out of bed for the first time after surgery, despite someone having cleverly removed my catheter but left drip in in middle of the night. 6 hours later bladder was about to burst. And when dh asked for help the midwife said 'can you manage please we are very busy and I have to go and weigh this baby' .

In an ideal world every hcp would have experience of being helpless and bed bound (I know, the practicalities would be tricky ) and know exactly how scary, humiliating and painful it is to have basic needs like going to the toilet or getting pain relief dismissed as an annoyance. I sympathise with how bad the workload is but I don't like the underlying attitude to patients that shines through in the op.

One of my elderly relatives came home from hospital to die recently. The nurses in the hospital were great, as were the nurses who visited at home - community nurses and Marie Curie nurses. We never felt she was at risk in hospital and she was cared for well.

I've had other experiences of a younger family member being treated terribly, and feeling that their life was in danger if I left them on the ward. I would be terrified to go into hospital having seen that.

And that's the difficult thing. I can see nurses doing an amazing job, but it only takes one awful experience to give someone a real fear of what may happen, particularly when that one experience seems to be tolerated by the culture of the NHS. The number of horrendous experiences mentioned on here is worrying.

Parents, not patients. Parents.

As a paed nurse, parents are as much your patients as the child is, surely?

mrsdevere really well put.
When my 18mth old son was in a famous london hospital, they brought him his lunch and dumped it on the bed without a word. It was 6 chips on a dinner plate. I chased after her with the plate- turns out it was supposed to be lasagna and chips but the lasagna had run out. So a member of staff had seen fit to give a child 6 chips on a dinner plate.
Until fundamental errors of common sense like this are eradicated, I can see no hope. Nurses have a hard job, but it's the PATIENTS that have it worse.

Could spin your head with how an older child can be treated in ICU.

Let's just say, I have never come as close to hating another human being as I feel about a couple of the people we met in there. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.

Good post MrsD.

Oh, and my toddler had a cannula in his foot- the bandage on it was black from walking around on the floor. A HOSPITAL floor. The mum of the ill premature baby in the next bed was terrified to leave her on her own because every time a nurse touched her, the mum had to ASK them to wash their hands even though the baby already had MRSA. These things are completely indefensible and all the staff involved should be ashamed

I couldn't handle being an auxiliary nurse if you paid me. That you guys do this voluntarily to even try and make patients lives a little bit easier is incredible and you should be very proud of yourself for giving up your time in this way. I hope it gets easier. Maybe not all the patients realise you are a volunteer.

Eh? An auxiliary nurse isn't generally a volunteer. Are you a volunteer op?

Doctor here.

I have the utmost respect for what you guys do and I honestly feel your pain. In fact, I resent the fact that sometimes I get a rude patient address me as "nurse" and demand this, that and the other and suddenly they're lovely once they hear I'm the doctor.

I wouldn't like to have nurses hire or fire me, though. For example, the other night, a nurse thought her patient needed antibiotics. I took her request seriously, assessed the patient, sent a septic screen. The bloods and vitals were perfect, clinically he was well. He was mildly confused, but I had known him from previous visits and previous wards, and he wasn't off his baseline (established dementia). He was new to this ward. I didn't start antibiotics. As usual for him, he became un-confused once morning arrived.

Since that night, the nurse in question has been extremely hostile towards me. She's a more senior nurse than I am a doctor. If she had that power, I'd genuinely be quite afraid she would try to fire me. I'd rather my job not be that precariously balanced!

But back to my original point, I love my job and most of my patients. I assume most of you nurses are the same, and I really, really understand your frustrations.