Elderly patient left on bedpan for days

It is a learned behavior from schools of nursing. How many of you remember lectures where the nursing instructor would tell of some neglectful act from nurse XYZ...think hard to recall any story like that in your nursing training. What was yours and your classmates reactions?? The clicking of the tongue, head shaking, and the unisone "awww, how horrible". So it begins...nursing students are conditioned to "catch" the errors of their peers, young and old, and condem them with disapproving looks and "shame on you" attitudes. I was very guilty of this too, but I grew up and realized I, and everyone around me is only human. And humans make errors...if you learn from the error you are successful in personal growth. Nurisng obviously has a lot of growing up to do; it starts with one.

We are peers- only we are in a position to judge one another. Only we can say what a reasonably prudent nurse would do, and if they press charges in such malpractice cases I think the jurers(sp?) should be nurses! I see nothing wrong with pointing out the flagrant errors here. That is part of learning. Drs do this when they present cases to each other as part of learning.

It's baffling to think that this could happen but these things do happen. I worked for a nursing home and had been off work due to having surgery. I should have known something was amiss when the aide I was relieving didn't bother with a report and didn't let the door hit her on the butt on the way out.

I make my first round and get to the end of the hall and in the room there was a sweet little old man. I open the door and the flies are EVERYWHERE. There's a noticeable odor and I'm thinking, "Ah Ha! That's why she left without giving report. She didn't want to clean him up!"

I go over to the little man and he has tears in his eyes. I pull the sheet back and he's sitting in urine and feces. The feces had practically dried to him and when I rolled him over he had MAGGOTS all over his buttocks!!!!!!!!!!! I was so stunned I couldn't believe it! How many people had been in and out of his room to give him medicine, bring him his food trays, and supposedly been in to check on him?!? I was furious!!!!!!! I marched into the DONs office and told her what I had found and informed her that I would no longer be working there. They had to get people in to clean him up wearing hazmat suits!!! Evidently it was worse than what I had seen!!!! I told the DON I would rather take a beating than to be a part of a company that did not care for it's residents.

I called in state. They came in and took over but that didn't help. They eventually had to be shut down because they had a little lady die from the THOUSANDS of fireant bites she received while in bed. She was unable to call for help due to complications from a stroke and the ants just took over her bed and stung her to death. I've been stung by a fireant and it literally feels like someone takes a cigarette and puts it out on your skin. Then after that lovely sensation you get this little pus pocket that develops. I cannot imagine in a million years how painful it would have been for that little lady.

It's horrifying to me to know that there are people out there who basically don't give a damn about anything but a paycheck. I think if you're going to go into nursing or anything related to caring for people you need to have some amount of compassion. You need know that these people depend upon you to make sure they are safe and taken care of. Incidents such as these should NEVER happen.

I don't think it's too much to ask that the nurses do their jobs. This is one of those things that falls within the realm of tasks that nurses do. I am fully sensitive to the disproportionate numbers of nurses who get thrown under the bus due to errors made by others, but this is not the case here. Turning, repositioning, and changing this patient was the nurse's responsibility.

I've had patients who refused changing and bathing, and I've found patients inadvertently on bedpans myself, but this is certainly the most extreme case I've ever seen. And yes, it was the nurses' fault.

Clearly there are significant issues here - I appreciate the call for consequences for the staff involved, but am also interested in what lead to this happening. As some members have pointed out, decubitus ulcers are multi-factoral and can develop quickly, and the initial allegation of 5 days is unlikely for a number of reasons. However, if this was caused by more than someone forgetting to take a patient off the pan and that not being caught for some time, I'd like to know more about how the system in place at that hospital allowed it to happen. Getting a clear picture and being able to implement change is harder in an atmosphere of fear and recrimination.

wow... I could not believe what I was reading in this article... then to read some of my fellow nurse's experiences being witness to something similar!
I am disgusted to think that anyone could do this to someone else... let alone a nurse, someone trained who should have been assessing that patient!!!!!! I am horrified!

Education is vital. So is punishment. Why? Just imagine this happening to your own tushie, your very own bum, that you have come to know and love, or to the bottom of someone you love - your Mom, your Dad, your Grandma, your disabled institutionalezed son or daughter - and you will have the answer. I hope.

If there is no punishment for something so absolutely outrageous, the perpetrators won't even like themselves or be able to forgive themselves - assuming they have blood in their veins and are relatively normal humans, not sociopaths with no ability to empathize with the suffering they inflicted upon this poor gentleman and upon all of us who are reading it, visualizing it, trying to come to grips with how such a monstrous event could have happened. So, punishment is needed. Corrective action, if you prefer that term, is required. Shutting the whole place down, firing everybody - these are extreme. Just figure out who is responsible for this atrocity and go from there. The goal is to make sure this absolutely can never happen again. That requires that people who work there have a heart for their work, that they give a D about people. If they are deemed uncaring, heartless, show them the door, report them to their licensing Board, and know that they will soon have to face litigation. If the employees are salvageable, salvage them.

What do you want to bet that whoever discovered it, whoever leaked it to the press, will be canned?

A thorough investigation is called for, not just of direct care workers who are responsible for this, but of the whole system. Staffing must be looked at, orientation procedures, annual or other evaluations, inservices, policy and procedure, Nursing service rules and regulations,, and who was the immediatel supervisor of the staff on these five days? How effective were the nurses assigned to this patient and to supervising the direct care staff, etc.?

A writer above says that the staff in this ward were unreceptive to them when she and her family expressed concerns about their Auntie, who was in their care. Let this be a lesson to never stop expressing your concerns. Go to a Supervisor, get the doctor on the phone yourself, get the Chief of the M<edoca; Staff or Chief of the Service, the DON, whoever you have to get to to have your concerns properly addressed. No need to be ugly to anyone, just be persistent, make your goal to get the best possible care for your loved one.

It's sad that we must do that but there are, apparently, lots of misfits employed in patient care worldwide - lots of folk who do not properly care about their patients and who don['t actually do the work they're supposed to do or maybe don't even know how to do it - back to educating staff.

I could go on but I think you understand what I'm saying and a lot of it has already been said by others. God help us to be devoted to caring for those in our care with honor and love of humanity. We must remember who we represent - our God, those who brought us up, our teachers and our school, our entire profession, our nursing students, whoever it is that we admire and want to emulate, and of course, ourselves and our families. Let us be diligent to quit ourselves like adults who realize that we have a sacred trust to care for humankind and to do it properly, proudly.

Can you hear the "Stars and Stripes" or the anthem of your own country or of your religion/church/synagogue/mosque/other place of worship (please forgive me, I do not know the names of thsee places in other religions - can someone help?). Can you hear your parents admonishing you to make them proud of you? I guess not all are raised this way. Or the pressures of life intrude and pull us aside. What a horrible workplace culture, if this type of event is anything but rare.

Walking Rounds might help.

Our wound care nurse made it a point to educate staff that even if the patient is on a turning air bed, they still must have pillows tucked on either side every 2 hours (as you would with a regular bed). Data has shown that the turning fails to relieve pressure points sufficiently on its own.

Very sad and unfair. Those people who wouldn't think twice about doing this to a poor elderly person need to remember that THEY WILL be elderly themselves one day. Some people, I guess, fail to realize that these individuals were once babies, children, young lovers, new parents, etc just like all of us. It's a lesson to be learned and this story needs to be passed around so that we can all learn something. It's the nurses job, you can't assume the CNA is going to do, or has already done it. As one of my favorite nursing teachers told us, "You better be looking at their butts, folks"!