All of us at one time or another have seen or heard of a nurse doing the most idiotic or blatantly stupid thing that goes against our grain of "good nursing". What's the worst you've ever heard? Here's one for you:
At a LTC where I worked, (this was LONG ago...) we had one nurse on 3-11 shift that all the other nurses kept complaining about because it was "common knowledge" that she always gave her 4 pm meds with her 8 pm meds. Of course, I never actually saw this happen and rarely ever worked with this woman. However, no one else would dare to approach this nurse as she had worked there "forever", and always got her way with whatever she wanted. She would leave the building and not clock out for her breaks, and spend a couple of hours at Walmart then return to work. I was told once that a family member approached her about a resident who thought was having a heart attack and this nurse told them "I'm not her nurse, you need to inform someone else"....this while she sat at the nurses desk filing her nails. Anyhow, one evening our DON just "happened" to check this nurses med cart...and guess what. Supposedly, all the 8pm meds had already been given (or at least they weren't in the med cards) Needless to say, she doesn't work there anymore. Actually, I believe she retired!!!
I don't understand how some nurses can be so PLAINLY unprofessional - not even attempt to hide it! EDIT: Just a reminder, this is what I had heard, not what I had witnessed. Had I witnessed anything close to this you better believe I would be on the phone with someone...and fast!!!
i took his arm, intending, i guess, to drag him into the room. but at that moment, he had a grand mal seizure and fell to the ground. in my infinite wisdom, i was trying to hold him up rather than follow him down to the ground, and his shoulder got dislocated on the way down. when all was said and done, the resident was admitted to our floor as a patient for a seizure workup, and i had to take care of him. the whole time, he was telling everyone "there's the b*tch that dislocated my shoulder!" :uhoh21:
ruby vee, rn
his shoulder "got" dislocated?
"took his arm ... to drag him"
hmmm .... does anyone have the right to put their hands on another person?
I have found that reporting nurse's who are doing very incompetent things or actually illegal things doesn't always do any good!!! And YOU get branded as a trouble maker!!
I worked with a new nurse who thought she knew everything... but didn't. We became friends and I tried to help her. For awhile she worked Eves and I worked Noc's. So I found alot of things she did wrong and I would talk to her about them and tell her how to do it right. I found things like wrong narc counts... then help her figure out where she went wrong. ANyway long story short after about 2 years of this she did something I could no longer keep quiet about so I wrote it up to the DON. In the write up I let her (DON) know that this isn't the first incident but I had tried to talk to her and help her without success.
The next day I went in to talk to the DON and she told me she had given the write up paper to the nurse I wrote up and she told me to talk with her about it!!:angryfire
I told her I was not this nurse's supervisor and that I didn't think it was my place. Nothing changed!! Then from then on the DON and the nurse I wrote up made my life difficult until I finally quit.
As I was quitting the nurse I had wriiten up started an agency with another nurse who worked there. The facility had never used agency in the 8 years I had been there. After they started their agency all the sudden we were using agency and their agency exclusively!! Made for a very unethical, bad situation!! Glad I got out when I did.
Just don't want new nurse's to think you report someone and life is peachy. If so then you have a great supervisor and I would follow that person to the moon. But unfortunately in my 15 years of nursing those supervisors have been quite elusive!!!
The student nurse was told to give me a fleets, I got the fleets but this student missed the proper opening. best part was they reported good results. I found out when I c/o about being constipated.
Forgive me for I must be having a "senior moment".... So this student nurse missed the "proper opening"????? You mean to say she led you to believe you were getting a DOUCHE not an enema and that's why you didn't stop her?
I have found that reporting nurse's who are doing very incompetent things or actually illegal things doesn't always do any good!!! And YOU get branded as a trouble maker!!
I worked with a new nurse who thought she knew everything... but didn't. We became friends and I tried to help her. For awhile she worked Eves and I worked Noc's. So I found alot of things she did wrong and I would talk to her about them and tell her how to do it right. I found things like wrong narc counts... then help her figure out where she went wrong. ANyway long story short after about 2 years of this she did something I could no longer keep quiet about so I wrote it up to the DON. In the write up I let her (DON) know that this isn't the first incident but I had tried to talk to her and help her without success.
The next day I went in to talk to the DON and she told me she had given the write up paper to the nurse I wrote up and she told me to talk with her about it!!:angryfire
I told her I was not this nurse's supervisor and that I didn't think it was my place. Nothing changed!! Then from then on the DON and the nurse I wrote up made my life difficult until I finally quit.
As I was quitting the nurse I had wriiten up started an agency with another nurse who worked there. The facility had never used agency in the 8 years I had been there. After they started their agency all the sudden we were using agency and their agency exclusively!! Made for a very unethical, bad situation!! Glad I got out when I did.
Just don't want new nurse's to think you report someone and life is peachy. If so then you have a great supervisor and I would follow that person to the moon. But unfortunately in my 15 years of nursing those supervisors have been quite elusive!!!
where I was working the noc nurse was doing the same thing to me except a lot of the so called med errors weren't, I couldn't figure out why the med pass kept getting worse and I couldn't get done. day shift kept putting meds and txs on the evening shift. since I worked all 3 shifts I new how the work load was on each one. 7-3 shift I was done at 1pm looking for things to do, 3-11 you never got done, 11-7 is what you found to do. I am not saying that they were never busy they just had more time to find something I didn't get done. and 7-3 shift had 2 nurses plus the unit manager on the floor, total in house nurses on 7-3 shift = 16-18 3-11 shift=8 11-7 shift= 5 yep they piled on the work and when I couldn't get it all done they wrote me up as if I were some kind of incompetent fool.
Forgive me for I must be having a "senior moment".... So this student nurse missed the "proper opening"????? You mean to say she led you to believe you were getting a DOUCHE not an enema and that's why you didn't stop her?
excuse me, no she just missed the target. and I was in ICU and didn't want to get her into trouble, plus I was in hypovolemic shock at the time, coming out of it
Some of these stories area bit nitpicky IMHO. Some people can and DO swallow well around an NGT unbelievably. And its not alife threatening event to run a litre bag of IVF with potasssium through a correctly functioning dial-a flow...not on an adult.....I have had to do that because I haven't had ENOUGH pumps for all the patients and had to prioritize pumps for the drips...Lidocaine, Cardizem, Heparin, Natrecor, etc. Some of the above 'blatant no no's are really only 'not best practice' or policy problems more than actual med errors. Simple TEACHING may be the only remedy necessary since likely no harm would be done...I hope some of the reporters here aren't enjoying their write ups too much. There's already too much of that. When did nurses start preferring writeups and punitive response to education? Its a big problem out there IMHO...no solidarity.
I remember working an agency shift at a place once and I did not change a tube feed bag cuz I didn't know it was policy for night shift to do so. I came back the next night and the nurses had made a HUGE deal and had 'written me up' on a med error form for this!! I just shake my head at these types of nurses....where is their sense of priorities??? GRR.
where I was working the noc nurse was doing the same thing to me except a lot of the so called med errors weren't, I couldn't figure out why the med pass kept getting worse and I couldn't get done. day shift kept putting meds and txs on the evening shift. since I worked all 3 shifts I new how the work load was on each one. 7-3 shift I was done at 1pm looking for things to do, 3-11 you never got done, 11-7 is what you found to do. I am not saying that they were never busy they just had more time to find something I didn't get done. and 7-3 shift had 2 nurses plus the unit manager on the floor, total in house nurses on 7-3 shift = 16-18 3-11 shift=8 11-7 shift= 5 yep they piled on the work and when I couldn't get it all done they wrote me up as if I were some kind of incompetent fool.
I can tell you that this wasn't the case in terms of what I wrote about. I wasn't looking for things to find wrong with her work!! I didn't have to look:uhoh21:
I dare say there are a lot of us who have cut corners at one time or another...stones...glass houses???
And, oh dear nursing students...sweet little lambs, who are almost traumatized at the sight of an old nurse changing a dressing without gloves or dropping a pill on the counter of the med cart and picking it up-with BARE hands!-and putting it back in the med cup (oh my!)
And heaven forbid they give an HS med with 4pm meds (even though the patient may always be in bed by 5 or 6pm). And of course, it is a matter of life and death that someone gives 4 and 8pm Zantac together...And furthermore, you know even though this nurse likely has 40+ patients who get their meds. at 4pm, how dare that lazy bum not give those 40 pts. their meds AT 4PM!!!
I know a very good nurse who refuses to draw blood wearing gloves. I choose to wear gloves but she doesn't, and the DON knows she doesn't. It isn't even an issue. I remember what it was like in school, life in the nursing field was a perfect black and white world. Then I got out in the real world. I'm so thankful I don't work at a place where everyone is so uptight. And lo and behold, it has a reputation for providing some of the best nursing care around. And we use diapers and everything! Go figure.
One of my the biggest no-no's I've made happened a couple years ago. Mind you, this was not exactly life threatening, but it bothers me very much because I was not being the patient advocate that I needed to be. Well, anyways, I was caring for a man in his 60s on my post-surgical unit who'd had a facelift done earlier that day. I was working eve's that day and upon my initial assesment, everything looked fine with him. Let me also just throw in here that this particular patient was a retired doctor, so I made it a point to let him see me doing a full assessment (and yes, I do a thorough, and complete assesment on all my patients). So, about three or four hours into my shift, I noticed that one side of his face was quite a bit larger than the other side, and although the patient denied any pain, he did report feeling pressure to the swollen side. I immediately got a set of vitals, made the pt NPO (in case he had to go back to the OR), and instructed him not to get out of the bed for now. I called his surgeon who said he'd be over shortly. In the meantime, I gathered some sterile gloves, gauze, drapes, etc. in case the surgeon decided remove the original dressing at the bedside so he could cover the wound without contaminating it. So, surgeon arrives about 25 minutes later, goes into the room and basically just confirms what I already knew, that the patient had a hematoma on one side of his face. Here comes that bad part. Surgeon does decide to remove the entire dressing to get a better view, so I attempt to pass the sterile glove package over to him. Well, he takes a pair of gloves from the box on the wall (the unsterile ones) and proceeds to remove the dressing. I didn't think too much of this, but then he grabs a clean, cloth bed pad from the cabinet next to patient's bed and kind of tucks it under the patients head on the affected side. He then takes a pair of tweezers and scissors (can't even remember where he pulled them from, but they weren't sterile) and begins cutting the sutures on the side of his face. Blood trickles out, then just pours out as the surgeon enlarges the opening. He then shoves two of his fingers into the wound and under the patients skin to try to dig out some clots, which he does pull out two huge clots. All the while, the patient is lying calmly on the bed answering the surgeon's questions as if the man doesn't have his hand in the patient's face digging around. Mind you, there was no anesthesia or numbing agents used during this entire time. Surgeon finally stands, takes the bloody gloves off and tosses them on the windowsill and asks me to go ahead and get him ready to go back to the OR. I quickly readied the patient, but I just felt really bad about not advocating for my patient by putting the sterile equipment in front of the surgeon to use and not pushing for him to get some type of numbing medicine before decdided to dig around in the patients face. Although the patient didn't seem to mind, it still bothers me to this day, which has turned me into a much better patient advocate now. By the way, the patient healed just fine and didn't suffer any other complications to my knowledge. Sorry so long.
I'm still finishing my pre-reqs, but thought this is the perfect place to get something off my chest, something that dissuaded me from me wanting to be a nurse for the longest time.
I'll keep it as short as possible.
I won't name the hospital, for fear of offending anyone, but I will say it is in *********** and there are several similar stories I have heard from family and friends about this hospital.
My beloved "Maw-Maw" needed to have a quadruple bypass. When they touched a calcified artery, she had a massive stroke and heart attack on the table. Do you know how long it took them to tell us? WEEKS. Seriously, after the surgery, they told us all we had to do is "wait for her to wake up."
So, they finally do tell us that she had a massive stroke. She was lost and trapped in her mind for 6 months, all the time them giving us hope. She could open her eyes, smile, and squeeze your hand, on her GOOD days, that was it. She was on a breathing tube, feeding tube, and numerous other things. She had to have a tracheotomy.
Now, I was living 2 hours away, and was trying to go back down every weekend, whenever I would get off from work. Do you know I would sit with my maw-maw, and she would have a BM, I would call the nurse's station. It took FOUR HOURS for them to come on this particular occasion, and I called every 15 minutes.:angryfire :angryfire
I think the worst of the things I could tell is what we finally found that was keeping the infections coming and eventually killed her. My aunt was told of hospice, and when they came to transfer her, the transporters were in shock. They found bedsores the size of your fist in her back, stuffed up with gauze to keep the fluids from pouring out. They had not been turning her at all. :angryfire :angryfire :angryfire After my maw-maw passed three days later, my aunt took pictures, which I regret seeing.
Thanks for letting me vent, guys. It took so long to get over this, and so long to be able to trust that not all nurses/medical professionals are like this..I prayed for that staff every night, my aunt would put money in my maw-maw's hands so that she could "tip" the nurse's aides and anyone else, and this is what she got?
Take care,
Tanya
I am so sorry for your lose.I too had very close relationships with both my grandmothers. I belive you can use this to give the kind of care you would want to have seen your MawMaw receive.
when all was said and done, the resident was admitted to our floor as a patient for a seizure workup, and i had to take care of him. the whole time, he was telling everyone "there's the b*tch that dislocated my shoulder!" :uhoh21: 
gnunurse
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