Lately, in that ever-elusive quest for the perfect patient satisfaction scores, our NM has decreed that all pain meds are to be offered at exactly the time the patient could have them. That is to say, if they are ordered prn q 3, then we offer them q 3, without the patient having to request them.
Now she has declared that for post-op patients, they will be given q 3 (or whatever), even if that means waking the patient. This, she says, will improve patient satisfaction because pain will be more controlled.
I'm old, but if an order says PRN, that still means AS NEEDED, and that is the way I'm going to do it. If a nurse woke me up to give me a pain pill, I can guarantee that WOULD NOT improve my patient satisfaction. In addition, while I am not sure the docs know (yet) that this is being done, I feel if we are not following the orders as written, we are setting ourselves up for some nastiness from them, and maybe from the BON.
Anybody else coming up against this?