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??!

Near your experience sounds terrible and blatantly negligent. Lucky you were there for your child as it seems the nurses clearly weren't and we're not bothered. I hope you do complain.

Near - while you might think a RN escorting a patient to xray is 'mismanagement of public funds', has it even occurred to you than this policy may be a result of an incident, somewhere in the Trust, where a patient didn't have an escort and they came to some sort of harm?

These 'silly' policies (to you) are about prevention and safeguarding.

Management/government/whoever don't allow for this in the staff budgets.

It has nothing to do with the nurse's competency.

Complain all you want, just direct it in the right place.

near If something had happened to your child on the way there would you have complained then? Would you have moaned about 'management of public funds' then, or would you have been happy we assessed the risk and decided it needed an RN escort?

In my old trust the majority of paeds got an escort. One thing about children is that they can seem fine one minute, the next not. A crash outside of a ward is much more dangerous than one in one. Extra precautions must be taken.

If you find that unacceptable, then I think you need to rethink your stance.

The point you are all missing is that if nobody was checking regularly on my dd before and after surgery - indeed before surgery I was left with the medicines to give her myself and we didn't see a nurse all night - I think the risk of something bad happening on the way to Xray was pretty minimal. They discharged her 30 minutes after the Xray and nobody checked her after the Xray was taken. Are you honestly saying that would have happened if there was any risk that she might have suddenly developed respiratory problems and required resuscitation. If it hadn't been for the Xray, which was required because she slipped in the loo and missed the seat because she misjudged her position and wasn't confident using the zimmer !, we were due to be discharged three hours earlier. I'm sorry, I still don't get the use of resources.

I complained about rude nursing staff and lack of care. I received an NHS double speak apology. I even heard the staff saying very loudly, "we're not having any more up here yet, the a&e bands aren't breaching, so they can stay down there until the next shift come on. I thought that was pretty disgusting and I hope no nurse on here would disagree with me.

No we didn't miss that point. As we said many times, poor care should be reported. No-one has doubted that.

You keep on about the xray escort. We are telling you why that is policy.

You are ignoring it.

Near I don't think anyone is excusing that, that is completely and utterly wrong that the care failed before and after surgery. You are completely right there. But you're using that to discriminate against policy that is needed, and does come in useful.

I had a hospital appointment Friday all the staff were lovely and efficient. Where would we be without them?

Near
Nurses are with you when you say you want excellence in care .
Do you think Nurses want to be accused of neglect or want to be so stressed at the prospect of potentially harming someone that they have a nervous breakdown ?

Your stance ( and I am pretty sure I know your previous user name) is one of hatred towards all nurses.
Doctors are never wrong ,it will always be the fault of nurses.
The Doctor who didn't see your father on the day he was in clinic for review could never be wrong but the nurse who didn't get the "notes signed off" - what the heck is getting notes signed off ? was in the wrong. You are choosing to see the nurse as wrong , when any fool knows that individual HCP are responsible for their own documentation.
If a doctor saw your father ,they and they alone are responsible for the lack of documentation ,if they didn't, I cannot imagine a doctor falsifying notes to say they saw a patient when they didn't- the doctor who signs to say they reviewed a patient would also have to sign the death certificate with regards to the cause of death.
You seem to know very little regarding the official procedures.
The nurses who didn't care for the children you witnessed are responsible for that poor practice and you are well within your rights to complain.
You are carrying an awful burden of anger and do you know what - I really feel for you, how strange is that .

These stories are nothing short of hysterical.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if people are in the wrong jobs...

Now I'm not a paediatric nurse (I'm adult), but even I can come up with the logic that someone needs to accompany a child to X-ray. The porters do not stay with patients when they take them down to the department as even though the patient has been called for their appointment that doesn't mean they will go in as soon as they get down there. There are always emergencies going in CT and X-Ray from A&E.

You should have been allowed to accompany your DD however, the nurse still would have had to go as the accountable person.

In our trust porters can take notes on their own. If patients are on heart monitors they need to be accompanied and if they are on certain IV meds.

I was allowed to accompany my daughter.

This thread started about a nurse complaining that patients required help and support with every day matters when in hospital and she (or he) thought that level of help was over the top and an inconvenience for staff.

If we get back to that, most people don't chose to be in hospital, most people are not as comfortable in hospital as they are at home. All people, in my opinion, are entitled to be kept comfortable, to be kept informed, and to be treated with the utmost respect and dignity when they are in hospital; whether that inconveniences the staff or not and I don't think treating people with dignity should be regarded as an inconvenience.

I would still say, in my daughter's circumstances, it did not require a nurse to spend an hour accompanying a trolley to carry the notes. If my daughter was at risk and if she required monitoring then she should have been monitored when she was on the ward and she was not.

The nurse was not there to carry notes < head desk > she was there to keep your DD safe.
I agree that monitoring on the ward should have been better.
A nurse didn't start the thread - an HCA or "Auxillary nurse " did.
My opinion is that anyone who grumbles like they did should choose a different career , they are clearly not suited and don't understand how vulnerable people feel in hospital.

NearTheWindyMill, you've just got an axe to grind. I don't believe that this is a faithful account of your experience by any stretch.

It is completely truffle.

But what people are trying to tell you Near, is that it is hospital policy for all patients to be accompanied by a nurse to X Ray etc. The nursing staff cannot pick and choose who they go with.

I accept that. But in my dd's case it was a silly policy imho and it seemed such a waste of time when the same nurses were not bothering to care for patients on the ward. I find that very difficult to reconcile and the impression it left was that it was much nicer to have a walk and a sit down than to actually look after the children on the ward.

You need to keep that anger directed at those individuals then Near, not slate every nurse/HCA for being thick or jobsworths (can't remember what wording you used, but you implied it)

Would it be silly if your DD had suddenly vomited post op and choked on her own vomit?- the porter would stand and watch ... your child choke to death.
Because he/she has no idea what to do.
So its wrong that nurses didnt monitor children on the ward( agree with you) but ok to send a child to xray alone postop ( don't agree).

You have been told that a doctor is responsible for his own note keeping, not a nurse.

You have been told that it is policy re escorting.

You complain that your child received inadequate monitoring on the ward and complain when she was escorted and monitored off the ward.

If your daughter had have been sent down to XRay without an escort you'd be on here now complaining that she'd had NO nursing care at all.

Fact is there are some people who seek to tar all nurses with the same brush. I have seen some really shitty parenting in my time by parents bringing their children to hospital. Good job I do not use THAT to generalise about all parents isn't it? I have the good sense to realise that there is bad and there is good in nursing. However when I hear somebody whinging on that ALL Nurses are crap it is hard to take what you say seriously to be honest. I also wonder whether this is a gender thing in that some women defer naturally to the (often) male doctors and dislike the fact that the (often) female nurses are in a position of seeming control over them.

As for confirmation bias- we have google for that.

I also wonder whether this is a gender thing in that some women defer naturally to the (often) male doctors and dislike the fact that the (often) female nurses are in a position of seeming control over them

There are some parents who shout and are rude and abusive to the nurses but are as nice as pie as soon as the doctor arrives.

This is a case of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing.
You can't draw conclusions about the reasons nurses and doctors say and do certain things because you don't know how the system works.
People who complain and complain and become verbally offensive to the nursing staff are impeding their work and a lot of time gets wasted trying to pander to their every whim...in the meantime these clinical staff members are not able to do their job.
It's completely unreasonable to expect a breakdown of every method of working... Staff will be as helpful as possible but they can hardly be expected to interrupt patient care to adjust TVs etc that's ridiculous.
You wouldn't get the postman to come in and hang a picture for you or unblock the sink.... Get real , docs and nurses have little enough time as it is to take bloods, run drips, arrange tests, examine pts, instigate new treatments, review test results, ask other senior doctors advice, write in the notes, do and check obs, see to the most unwell patients , probably attend two or three other wards as well as the current one, attend clinics, dictate letters, review any problems and see the other thirty patients under their direct clinical care.
Do you want them to magic up extra time to do toast and fix tellies and answer every question imaginable from demanding relatives....they have to prioritise or people die that's what medicine is all about. It's not a residential home it's a hospital and some respect for the docs and nurses wouldn't go amiss.

And I could post a litany of Doctor's mistakes that would make peoples hair curl.

There are crap HCPs of all 'persuasion' and some damn fine ones. I'm not concrete enough though to assume that they are all one of the other nor see my experience as the objective truth.

I feel quite upset tonight because I looked after yet another relatively young patient with COPD who could not breathe for coughing and is dying, it's so sad to see a person who cannot do anything without gasping for breath.

Anyone reading this who smokes, please stop smoking, I'd start a thread on it but I doubt there's any point because no-one will listen.