Can you chart too much?

I was working at a LTC facility several years ago. One of my coworkers decided to chart that a resident was using plastic cutlery to consume his/her meal, and that this same resident had to go to the kitchen to get the plastic fork, knife, and spoon.

During an annual survey, state surveyors read this nurses very detailed charting and decided to tag the facility with a deficiency. If this particular nurse had been more vague with her documentation (or had never documented this incident at all), the deficiency never would have occurred because the incident never would have entered the awareness of the state surveyors.

I'm sorry, but...what that good or bad? Are residents allowed to go into a facility's kitchen on a regular basis in some places? At the facilities where I worked we always made sure to supply the residents w/whatever they needed, thereby no need for them to go into the kitchens, which was prohibited even to us nurses by red/white lines delineating how far in we could approach. I thought their incursions into the kitchens was discouraged for hygiene/safety issues.

if you directly witnessed it, chart it as you saw it, I don't care what management says. Chart who's hands went where ect. If you did not witness it it, obviously just chart what the patients are stating, in quotation marks. Stating something is "inappropriate" is very subjective and non quantitative.

Incident reports are not supposed to be referred to in the patients medical record.