Financial questions on admissions. Is this in the scope of practice?

[generalhospital]

For those of you who do admissions at LTCF's , are you responsible for the paperwork that is usually done by the Housing Coordinator. I am referring to the forms that require you to ask financial questions like "Have you given away large sums of money in the past five years?" Or basic questions about bank accounts in general. When admissions come in after 5 and on weekends (which is when most admissions show up) our Housing Coordinators don't want to come in and they want us to basically do their job in addition to our own clinical responsibilities that we have with admissions. Is this typical? I feel that asking financial questions to someone that I am going to care for may border on being a conflict of interest or at the least it is not in my scope of practice. Looking for comments on this. Thanks!

[kmarie724]

I don't know what's typical or legal, but I work in LTC and nurses are not expected to deal with any of the financial paper work. If an admission come in after hours, someone from the admission office comes in and deals with it. The nurses are only responisble for nursing assements, MD orders, ordering meds from pharmacy, etc.

[pennyaline]

For those of you who do admissions at LTCF's , are you responsible for the paperwork that is usually done by the Housing Coordinator. I am referring to the forms that require you to ask financial questions like "Have you given away large sums of money in the past five years?" Or basic questions about bank accounts in general. When admissions come in after 5 and on weekends (which is when most admissions show up) our Housing Coordinators don't want to come in and they want us to basically do their job in addition to our own clinical responsibilities that we have with admissions. Is this typical? I feel that asking financial questions to someone that I am going to care for may border on being a conflict of interest or at the least it is not in my scope of practice. Looking for comments on this. Thanks!

Scope of practice has nothing to do with it. Nor is it a conflict of interest or a HIPAA problem. It is a reflection of cost cutting. There are many facilities that have their admissions people review payment sources for prospective admissions even during after hours, and some that insist their admissions people come in to meet new admissions and their families. But there are others that only want whoever is there to get all of the financial and insurance information down and the patient entered into the system, and they'll worry about hashing out reimbursement another time. It's up to the facility to decide how they want it done.

[generalhospital]

Nurses are all upset about this and when we went to the administrator (who could care less about us, just wants to save money) she pullled the old "Additional duties as required" routine. We asked if it was more important to get meds ordered or do paperwork. No comment. Of course they want us to do both.

[bossynurse101]

In my experience the admission paperwork is pretty cumbersome - with many, many financial questions. Most of the AD's I've dealt with are happy to just get the Consent to Treat papers signed and that's it. They will deal with the rest when they come back in - after all, they are much more equipped to answer the usual questions that go with all that paperwork. That is their job. Sounds like you have an admissions team that is either short staffed, not very customer savvy, or lazy. Just more typical cost cutting, let the nurses handle it BS.