Things you thought you would never see in LTC

Specialties Geriatric

Published

Some of us have been in LTC and have seen things change alot over the years. Heck..the last year or so has been crazy at my place.

Things that have changed is the LOS (length of stays) We now do alot of short term rehab and with that are seeing alot of different things.

Chest tubes..hanging triple IV abtx on multiple residents, PCA pumps or epidural infusions, hanging plasma....

how about you??

yes we have seen many changes in our long term facility over the last three years. we take trach patients, hang i'v's and even recently began taking residents with chest tubes and other more critical patients. and our latest venture is a program put in place to keep residents out of the hospital to be treated in our facility until we can no longer "truly" meet their needs. some of the changes are good things and hey it keeps our nursing skills up to date but wow does it put some stress on our nurses because this program makes them run a care path amongst all residents which has added much time consuming paper work which takes them away from direct patient care. i hope the programs work out but we are faced with many more challenging items on the board for the next six months. nursing is always changing and evolving and takes time to adjust to. but i'd rather do all we could do for our residents as our hospital primarily sees our nursing home residents and automatically wants to put them on hospice for a simple uti which they tend to recover from after some period. i wish you luck with your changes but we are all facing changing and challenges every day.

Specializes in LTC.

Myself.

Specializes in Pediatric Private Duty; Camp Nursing.

My facility was heading towards higher acuity pts right around the time I quit about a year ago. They started admitting pts requiring TPN, which made my life difficult bc as an LPN this was not in my scope of practice. I'd have to run and find an RN to do that for me. Of course I was always given a hard time bc everyone was overworked.

Specializes in none.

All of the things that is was taught in Nursing School that I would never do I've done. That's to my superior intellect and a Nursing home where the MD was drunk most of the time. This was back in the early 1970's. Prolapse uteri, rectums, I put back. In the 70's for an LPN to do this was called Voodoo.

Specializes in LTC,Hospice/palliative care,acute care.

Conjugals.....I have no problems with this as long as I don't have to burn my retinas out by seeing it.

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