We have a young female patient on our acute care unit. She's been with us for about 5 months. She's EXTREMELY needy - one the call bell every 15-20 minutes during the day and evening. Lately, she has been able to get out of bed with assist. This wouldn't be such a problem, but she her legs are so weak that she is literally "dead weight". To make things even more problematic, our hospital only has one mechanical lift on the rehab unit. However, the patient will not wait for someone to get it, and often becomes dramatic and screams out if we are "late" answering her call bell. So many of us have resorted to getting her out of bed with the assist of 2 nurses. Again, making this more problematic, is that the patient is on dialysis and feels the urge to void about every 30 minutes - and usually only goes a few drops (literally). For a while, we had 3:1 ratio with her, but not our manager says that we can't do that anymore. We have a nurse out with a torn rotator cuff and another with a herniated disc - both thought to be from this patient. We have tried telling the patient that it is not safe for us to get her out of bed, but she doesn't seem to care that we are breaking our backs. She flat out refuses the bedpan. And, againg, becomes overly dramatic if she has to wait 10 minutes for someone to get a mechanical lift from another unit. Does anyone have some strategies or recommendations for how we can best deal with this issue?
