I am coming off several shifts with a difficult family of a patient. I work peds so the the family is at bedside 24/7 with the patient. We get people like this every so often and it really saps the energy and morale of the best of the nurses on the floor. This family has demanded every special service the hospital offers and then some, including additional staff at bedside at all times. They complain about everything. They question everything. They want everything just so.
This particular patient is complex and has a lot of nursing and care needs. They would have been a time consuming patient to begin with. But then the parents demand that the needs have to be performed just right. I'm not talking about doing things safely, I'm talking about doing things exactly as they want us to do them because they like to control everything. Examples: lining up the diaper tabs just so, changing the diapers every hour on the dot, positioning the patient to the left on the even hours and the right on the odd hours of the clock. There are signs all over the room in small writing that dictate the types of things the family wants done for the child. And no one has time to read them because the parent is talking our head off the whole time.
They have fired many of the nurses and aides on the floor, as well as the special services people the hospital is paying to stay at bedside 24/7 to assist with this family's needs. They tell a nurse who is the room how terrible another nurse is-- not realizing that we all talk about it outside the room to each other. They do the same thing with the doctors, and the doctors also will talk about it outside the room.
The family demands certain things from the medical team. They demand that we call the doctors to bedside frequently throughout the shift to the point where one night the doctor parked themselves near the room in case they were called again. This doctor was in charge of many patients and would have to leave and see them, too, and then the parent would be very upset and take it out on the nurses.
I had to refuse to give certain medications sooner than scheduled, and also refused to give some PRNs based on the patient condition-- giving them would have caused harm at that time due to the patient's condition.
I literally spent hours in that room. Even though the other patients I was given were easier on purpose-- and I did the required assessments and all that on them, one of them commented on this high needs family and said that since they came to the unit, they "never saw their nurse anymore." They also commented that they felt sorry for the nurses who had to take that family as the parent was a "piece of work." We are a teaching unit and it takes time to talk to the families and teach them care when they are close to discharge.
This high needs family is obviously sapping the life out of the staff, the hospital, and even affecting the other patients on the unit. In the age of satisfaction surveys and customer service, where do we draw the line? When can the higher-ups say enough is enough about patients like this?
Also since our hospital has specialty areas, there is nowhere else to go if the family wanted to move to a different hospital. And one family we had a couple years ago who tried-- the hospital sent them right back to us because they were so complicated.
