Assisted living- what happens when patients need more care?

Specialties Hospice

Published

Help- new to hospice and don't know how to approach this subject. I have a patient who is in assisted living and is falling much. We provided temporary continuous care til facility and family could provide back-up plan for safety. Family sits with patient for a few hours a day and then facility does hourly checks. Any other suggestions? Patient remains at a risk for falls and I don't know that this plan is enough.

Specializes in Hospice / Ambulatory Clinic.
Continuous care never met fulfulling the job of a sitter. It's for crisis/EOL.

Yup though sometimes when a patient has a primary caregiver the caregiver will over represent the patients symptoms so they can get a CC nurse to come out. The CC nurse ends up being a "sitter" while the caregiver takes off for a while. There is nothing more mind numbing arriving at a case ready to 'do your thing" and find you have 8 hours of sitting in front of you

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Specializes in OB/GYN/Neonatal/Office/Geriatric.

@tothepointeLVN: That is probably what I saw happening. Death wasn't imminent but coming at some point. I know the only "sitter" I ever saw were hospice. ALF is one of those weird places where people are PROMISED they can age in place or die, but they don't ever bring up what truly happens because staffiing is too low or a person needs skilled nursing care. No one is told about the possibility of going to the "nursing home" because of xyz.

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Specializes in Hospice / Ambulatory Clinic.

Sometimes the billing justification for me being there is "caregiver" educaion. Caregiver often being the ALF staff. Really? Like thats going to go over well and they don't have time to spend more than 3 minutes talking about that patient. Caregiver education for a private home not so bad but still pretty boring. Had one case where the caregiver somehow convinced the young admitting RN to give her a weekend of CC coverage when another finally came to evaluate the case he was shocked.

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Specializes in OB/GYN/Neonatal/Office/Geriatric.

You would not be bored where I am. I could use help with caregiver ed as well as resident ed. I am crunched for time and just had more put on me. I work 9 hour days and I still can't keep up. Our residents are very needy, we have an in-house doc and dentist so there is always work to do! We just had 2 call ins so I gotta get my beauty sleep.

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