Originally published 14 years ago. I thought it was so funny and true!!
The 12 Rules of Home Care Nursing
1. The patients who require the most equipment and who are the least mobile always live in the smallest houses.
2. On any rainy day, you will have to walk through a muddy puddle to reach your first patient. Your second patient will live in an elegant apartment with deep pile white carpet.
3. At any given time, half your patients will live in areas undergoing road construction. The construction will not be completed until you discharge the patient.
4. If you carry three or four pens with you, they will all work perfectly. If you carry only one, it will run out of ink before the end of your first patient visit.
5. Any time you use your last quarter to call the office from a pay phone, you will be put on hold for three minutes.
6. If you are late for a visit, you will inevitably find yourself behind a school bus that stops at every corner. If you attempt to get around it, you will find that all the traffic lights between you and your patients home will turn red as you approach.
7. You are tempting fate unless your lunch matches your uniform. If you wear white and eat a burger with ketchup, you will wear the ketchup for the rest of the day. The same principle holds true if you wear blue and put thousand island salad dressing on your salad. Always match your lunch to your wardrobe.
8. The only patient who ever needs a refill on a controlled substance prescription will need it on a weekend when the physician is out of town and no one is available to pick it up anyways.
9. At least once a month, you will find a patient who has had a hip replacement scrubbing floors or washing windows.
10. If you are in a grocery store on your day off, you will run into one of your "homebound" patients with a loaded grocery cart.
11. If you are miles from the office and about to use your last foley catheter, it will have a defective balloon.
12. As soon as you figure out how to manage the mountains of paperwork, HCFA (now CMS) will completely change the forms.
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12 rules of home care
