New nurse here...slapped today by patient.

Quite true. The blame that is continuously directed at frontline nurses occurs in a wide range of practice settings, not just hospitals. I have little patience when I hear any victims of violence being balmed for the incident. No one asks to be assaulted, raped, bullied, abused, etc.

What can I say? Your private malpractice insurance and/or private lawyer. Getting into pockets and public knowledge that you are not to be messed with is priceless.

truly, we nor the student nurse have enough info.Being a/o x 3 doesn't rule out a dementia. I think the hubby may have said to wife"you have nothing to be sorry about" because he knows her faculties are,maybe at times, problematic; uti is a possibility, being on ms04 is a possibility,as are other drugs that can disrupt the elderly thinking process.you don't always "see it coming" when an elderly pt. becomes combative. btw, was she from a ltc facility? even w/ some dementia, a pt. will feel remorse after their neg. behavior. sue

It trully scares/saddens me how true this seems at the moment...

Well, here it is more than a year after I first read this topic and now more than ever it bothers me that a nurse got slapped by an obviously ill patient and the the advice experienced nurses are giving has zero focus on the patient. sue, sue sue, make money in court. Teach that old lady a lesson. After all, it is all about the nurse.

Considering how toxic and self centered some of the replies have been, it is safe to assume that some of the people at this site are going to be bitter old people slapping nurses when they get to that age. Since reading that post I have been struck by several disoriented/confused patients and it never crossed my mind to sue them. My first reaction has been to try and figure out why they did it, what I can do to help them and how to keep myself as well as the patient safe in the future.

Some of the worst patients I have had are bitter old nurses that treat staff like total crap. When I see them I am really happy I didnt have to work with them when they were young and bitter. The worst family members I have had to deal with are bitter old nurses that know how to cause problems and go out of their way to do it. I bet they would have called the police and sued that old lady also.

At the very least I would file an incident report, report this to her physician, and request a psych eval. Somethings not right there. I've worked w/ demented and mental patients who are a/o x3 at the time of assessment and then turn on me like Linda Blair. I hope it all works out and I'm sorry this happened to you

Jenn

I agree completely.
In my experience just because someone is oriented 'person, place and time' doesn't mean they are oriented to events, that can make a huge difference in their reaction. The lol's response (waaaay back in the OP) that she thought they were 'playing with her' makes me suspect she wasn't fully understanding what was happening.

"I was hit by a patient during a bed bath when I was in nursing school, and when I told my instructor I was uncomfortable going back in this man's room, she proceeded to assign me to him every day for the rest of my rotation to teach me a lesson."
What, exactly, was the "lesson" she thought she was teaching you, I wonder? That you need to become accustomed to being a "punching bag"? Garbage! Pure and simple!
Unfortunately, this attitude seems to be very common in this field. Maybe a throwback to the days when nurses were slightly higher on the totem pole than women in general, but it does need to stop!
Several years ago, I was working on the dementia unit. We had a guy who was not really dementia, more psych, and could be very abusive, especially towards women. At that time there was a male nurse on one of the sister units...this guy was BIG, with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. Anytime Mr. Personality decided to pull a stunt, we'd run over to that unit and get him to help us. He never really had to DO anything, just kinda stand there, that was all it took...sometimes, if a situation looked iffy, we'd call him over as a sort of pre-emptive strike.
Ah well, that nurse quit and went elsewhere. Every now and then I think of him and wonder where he is today...Come back, Mr. Riker's Island-looking guy! We miss you!

I'm glad to see this thread active again.
One of the biggest reasons why nurses and other front line health care workers are abused so much is that we're viewed as nothing more than a bunch of women and therefore not valued by society as a whole.
Here in Canada the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation did research on the level of violence towards nurses and other frontline health care workers and found that based on compensation board claims, the level of violence towards us was more than three times higher than that of police officers. Think about the level of training that police officers receive in order to deal with potentially violent situations in comparrison to nurses. Nurses recieve little to no training in this area, yet were're told to deal with it. Also, in most jurisdictions it's a criminal offence to assault a police officer (male dominated profession), yet there's very few jurisdications where it's a criminal offence to assault a nurse (female dominated profession).
As for management, well the same holds true. I remember a story that I was told about a Nurse Manager who routinely blamed the staff each time they were assaulted. Her favourite question was, "What was your approach?" Well one day a group of nurses finally stuck up for themselves and confronted her with it by saying "show us how it's done then." This Nurse Manager was obviously backed into a corner and she went into a resident's room who had a long history of physical aggression. The next thing the nursing staff knew was, as the nurse manager leaned towards the resident, the resident punched the nurse manager right across the face. You guessed it, these nurses saw it happen and imediately questioned the nurse manager by asking "What was your approach?" That Nurse Manager never blamed another frontline staff member again for being a recipient of abuse.

I didnt really see this thread as a discussion about nurse abuse. I saw the original post as a situation in which a nurse failed to perform a complete assesment of a situation/patient. As a result it is very possible the patient and her family did not recieve the care she/they deserved. My impression was everyone just jumped onboard the "patient is wrong" train. Most people just wanted to punish the patient when, I believe, she probably had some mental/psych/med problems and her behavior was a sign of the problems. Now, a year later and with another years experience I am even more inclined to believe it was not just nurse abuse.