Dealing with lazy unsafe coworkers

[Codeblue1982]

I am just looking for advice on how to proceed with the sloths that work in my unit hopefully you can all give me some ad ice because I am at my wits end. My unit has a handful of individuals on each shift who are not only lazy but make a conscious effort to get out of doing work. I work on a busy critical care unit where teamwork is essential for survival. I have approached these people with specific incidents and let them know that they have missed things or that their patient is on the edge of crashing while they are surfing the Internet and it doesn't seem to change anything. I have contacted my manager about the stress level of the staff because of the extra work these people create as well as the unsafe care they provide and was basically told we should all be handling the situations ourselves. I do not mind having peer to peer communications but that only goes so far especially with people who are by nature lazy, one patient did not have vital signs run for an entire 12 hr shift and they were q 2 hr vs. I am at my wits end with these individuals and I worry about the safety of the patients. Am I out of line thinking that management should hold these types of people accountable and not expect the staff to do it all of the time. Oh another suggestion I was given Was to review the charting of these people with them before they leave..... Because we all have time to double check another nurses charting

[tnbutterfly - Mary, BSN]

Moved to Nurse Colleague / Patient Relations for more discussion about dealing with co-workers.

[uRNmyway, ASN, RN]

Well, if they are not following doctors orders and putting patients at risk, they definitely need to be reported. Since you say you have already done so to your manager and nothing was done, all I can say is you need to escalate things. Go above your manager. But do so with concrete evidence, not just whining that some of you are doing all the work while others do nothing. Point out the missing vitals. Not sure if you have computerized charting, but that does make it a bit easier it seems to me. When you have enough proof, go to your manager again. Explain that you have tried to talk to them and nothing has changed. Point out how they disregard patient care orders. If that still doesn't work, go above her head. Just make sure to have proof!

[ahya]

wow I really admire your patient advocacy and respect your high importance for our profession. I hope I can work with lots of nurses like you. I do think that I am in a safe place right now :) but I do to have some of your partial experience it is so frustrating but I just want you to know that please keep doing what is right and eventually I hope it will have a certain degree of effect on them;/. In my case the Good Lord God gave me the opportunity to take my profession in another place:) but I've heard now that they're doing good. In the end the good will always win:)

[Codeblue1982]

We do have computerized charting and I have taken concrete issue to my manager in the past which addressed labs not drawn that were time sensitive, admissions not done, patients lying in excrement that was dried on so obviously it was there for quite awhile, i even had a patient code at change of shift because the orders were not carried out to treat a critical potassium! I do make a point to do bedside report with nurses so if something like this is going on it gets caught quickly. All I'm looking for is accountability and to be able to have a professional level of trust in these types of coworkers. I'm sure this happens almost everywhere unfortunately however we are trusted by our patients to do the right thing by them and many times hold their well being or lives in our hands.

[ChristineN, BSN, RN]

I hope you are filing incident reports. Besides being able to create a paper trail, at my hospital all incident reports are cc'ed to my manager's boss. If you aren't documenting that this mistakes happened it will be much harder to prove later

[AmeliasAunt]

I can totally relate to this. In fact, it was one of the many reasons I quit a job after almost 6 years. I felt like I was the only nurse on the floor who cared about things being done properly. Many, too many, people have the "I'll just make it until 7" attitude and have no consideration for the nurse relieving them or anyone else. I once came in for night shift to find my patient with a heart rate in the 160s and the Amiordarone drip infusing but not even hooked up to the patient. Meanwhile, the nurse is sitting at her computer doing who knows what. Later find out she re-scheduled all kinds of meds to be given on MY shift, presumably to make her day easier, even tho they were scheduled to be given prior to 7pm. I talked to my manager about it. She tells me she is "going to take care of it". Yeah, that means nothing happened. Unfortunately, you are probably always going to work with these types of nurses. My best advice is to document, document, document. The incident reporting is a good idea too. Good luck!