Should I complain about this nurse

[AprilF00L]

or just let it go?

My very vulnerable, very elderly neighbour fell in his house recently and was treated in his home by paramedics.

Today as I was rushing out to an appointment a district nurse approached me and said that she was there to visit my neighbour but he wasn't in/ This really alarmed me due to his vulnerabilities and physical state. I asked if she'd looked in all the rooms and she said she had. I got her phone number to contact her after my appt.

On my return an hour later I came across her again. She told me that she had returned to see if my neighbour had returned home.

He'd never been out. He was sleeping in bed. She lied. She hadn't looked in every room. He could have been dead for all she knew.7

I'm so annoyed at her lying. So unprofessional. AIBU to report her.

But in many situations there’s a key safe but no one has told the nurse what the number is

Not all nurses are saints. The worst person I know is a nurse

Does your neighbour have a keysafe, otherwise what are the arrangements for the nurses to get in?

I work as a community carer and we do not carry keys on our person.

You don’t have to be housebound. District nurses visited me after surgery on an evening.

Which she did. So what exactly is
she being reported for ?

SHE CAME BACK!!!

Criteria here is housebound or something a practice nurse can’t do………or a part of that the gp surgery hasn’t signed up to eg wound care.

Thanks OP for being such a caring, considerate person, the world world would be a nicer place if there were more people like you. The nurse was lazy and of it's happens again you should definitely report her.

She didn't check with the neighbours because to do so would be a total breach of confidentiality. And speaking as an actual community nurse, I can assure you that we do not routinely get given key safe numbers - this doesn't just happen automatically.

You genuinely don't know what you're talking about, and come across as a spiteful busy body who is hell- bent on seeing a hard- working nurse getting into trouble

I don't konw how you get that I don't like her from that one comment?

She's actually really nice and I really do appreciate their existance, but as I said earlier on in the thread, she walked in without knocking at all, despite clear instructions to knock and wait.

My partner was here and we have dogs which I prefer to have moved out of the way so I can focus on what the particular visitor is here for (they're nice dogs, my OT asks to have a fuss and a cuddle once we've done whatever we need to discuss/measure/sort out!).

She failed to follow a simple instruction, and I checked, it was written down, she simply hadn't looked at her notes! (She was also shocked to find I wasn't a pensioner, she just saw 'pressure sores, housebound' and assumed all the rest for herself!).

I didn't post to complain and I didn't complain about her - she already felt silly as she'd just walked into a neighbours house in error too. Just to point out to all the people saying that nurses can't and don't just walk in, yes they can and they do.

I don't know what world you're living in. When my elderly (96yo) mother came out of hospital Home PathWay installed a key safe and the world and his mother had the code to it!

Whaat?? So is supposed to advocate for this poor old man?

This is exactly where abuse occurs. Somebody else said it better than me:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

It would be pretty standard for them to have it. We use the same system to write notes on as the district nurses in our area and key safe numbers are usually stored on peoples profiles.

This is all very standard these days. If someone has reduced mobility discharge assessment services push for key safes to be installed before they’ll even accept someone. They do make life a lot easier tbh.

I can’t find the newspaper article I remember reading but unqualified carers in similar circumstances were charged with neglect for not going into the home of one of their usual clients whom the hospital transport service had put back in a different room in his house on discharge, because they couldn’t see him in his usual front room they assumed he was still in hospital - pretty sure he starved to death It sounded awful

It isn’t very nice going round someone’s house calling for them, but it is part of the job - I remember waking up someone’s slightly drug addled son who was unexpectedly in the house as a student on my community placement as the door was unlocked and it being quite frightening, but we needed to know they were safe as they were vulnerable (but also at a hospital appointment!).

That nurse isn’t upholding the code by not doing her job properly or by lying. Provided it’s not a repeated pattern of behaviour she’d probably just be asked to reflect on the situation and identify what she’d do differently next time. If it’s persistently poor or neglectful behaviour and you’ve identified another instance of it - and she’s in trouble - probably don’t want her caring for vulnerable patients anyway

OP, it's charmers like you that made me put in my retirement papers.

Quick to point out what you see as errors. Quick to judge.

Nobody is obligated to discuss another's health with you. It's called patient confidentiality in my world.

(assuming the nurse had all the info she needed) - in which case she could say when asked to reflect what wasn’t joined up / working

I work in a world where we aren’t given the codes?

Are you on the paperwork as being your neighbour's next of kin (in lieu of any family)? If not, then I don't think this nurse had any obligation to answer your question about whether she'd looked in every room. You're neither a family member, nor a colleague of her's - so I think the only thing she's done which MIGHT be considered unprofessional, was to discuss this with you in the first place.
Glad to hear that he was there safe & well, that must've been a relief.

This nurse has done absolutely nothing wrong and the fact that so many on this thread can’t see that is absolutely baffling. Even if she ‘lied’ to the OP, given the OP is, as far as she knows an interfering busybody with no right to the information, not giving her the correct/any information was the exactly correct thing to do.

So many threads on here that start with an op saying ‘am I wrong to complain about this health care worker because xyz’ are met with ‘don’t you know the NHS is on its KNEES?’ as if objectivity has gone out the window. Why shouldn’t the op report a failing, if it improves care? All this ‘no wonder nurses and doctors are leaving if busybodies like you etc’ distracts from patient care which should be the primary concern.

She was back an hour later to double check. If you’re dead, an hour isn’t making too
much difference.
I think it’s not really any of your business to be honest.

Going back to recheck an hour later doesn’t sound like a negligent nurse to me.

Exactly. As I said earlier, I (a doctor) and a nurse frequently are out together on house calls. We often get intercepted by neighbours, some of whom are no doubt genuine, and some of whom are nosy. We give absolutely no information whatsoever, don’t even confirm who we are, and are often vague and inconsistent, in an attempt to protect the patient’s privacy and confidentiality.

We would never walk into a house unannounced, but if a neighbour started asking me how someone was and what attempts I’d made to contact them, I sure as hell wouldn’t be entertaining that discussion.

Here we use completely different systems so not standard at all