I am venting my pet peeves. I had one of each of these yesterday, 1 patient w/ 3 of these. Share with me yours.
I hate:
1. Giving enemas - I have never not caused a huge mess even before I get the solution INTO the patient.
2. Taking accuchecks - The accucheck needs a calibration or quality check, or has the wrong code card for the strips, or I don't stick the patient hard enough so there's not enough blood and then have to go run for another finger stick thingie because the second one I grabbed is faulty
3. Sitz bath - see #1
4. Simply having a patient in isolation - putting on and taking off the PPE can suck your time, and if the patient has the temp in their room up I get all hot and sweaty within 5 minutes
5. Putting in a foley - this is never as easy as it should be. Either the A&O patient is unhelpful "Please keep your knees up and apart Ms X" or the anatomy is unhelpful.
I hate checking in patients belongings. I work on a Geri psych floor as an aide and we have to mark patients belongings with names since we wash them on the floor. Patients typically bring in WAY more than 3 allowed outfits. And always bring in things without tags to mark on or everything is Black and we dont have silver markers. Oh and if things are getting put in the safe they have to be charted in 2 or 3 different places.
Specializes in Hospice, ONC, Tele, Med Surg, Endo/Output.
Giving out 15 pills to a demented pt who has to take one pill at a time--why does a 90 year old need megace and that stupid yogurt pill anyway? Going back to the pyxsis to waste a narcotic; have to grab another nurse to do it. Having patient on tele who keeps removing the monitor. Dressing changes, tube feedings, crushing pills, transferring pt's to another floor. Getting report from the ER: they never tell you the patient has wounds, they never start the pca, and fail to mention that there are a slew of relatives coming up to the floor with the patient; and the ER nurse always says how pleasantly confused the patient is---NOT!!! Also, why can't the ER nurse put the pt in a hospital gown with snaps or even at least put the patient in a gown in the first place? Thank God i left acute care and now work in hospice.
Spoon feeding patients that cannot feed themselves. Used to work with geriatric med-surg patients, and this seemed to take forever at my busiest times of day.
I hate feeding too! Easy, but I sit there thinking about the million other things that need to be done
Definitely isolation. This was my least favorite thing to do in nursing school. I get all gowned up, and then invariably the patient wants something not in the room, there's something to do that I need help with an no one is within sight of the door, or I've managed to forget something I shouldn't have. And then I'd see the floor nurses zip in to the room for something really quickly without gowning because "they're not going to touch anything and will be really quick" which made it seem even more pointless.
Aside from being time consuming it seemed so wasteful too, all that extra trash.
Giving IV metoprolol, mostly because it's such a slow push (1mg per minute is our protocol) but more so because of BP and pulse checks after (at 15 and 30 minutes post administration). I've never seen a dose change either of those all that much.
Foley teaching.
IV tubing changes, and CVL dressing changes.
Post op vitals and more than that, post radiology procedure vitals. The frequency drives me nuts (radiology: q15min x 4, q30 x 2, then q1hr x 4....overboard, but our rads won't change it).
Q1h resps on epidural patients. I know it's important, but it's a pain the neck.
I can not stand doing accuchecks and putting patients on telemetry. I believe this stems from working as an aide on a cardiac unit. It seemed like everyone was a diabetic and the tele leads were always being disconnected from the patient. The aides where I work cannot do accuchecks so I still do them. Cannot stand this especially when they are in isolation.
Specializes in Trauma Surgery, Nursing Management.
Cleaning the wheelchairs. When did this become a nursing task? I'm too busy, and we have housekeeping, but this for some reason has been assigned to nurses.
When I did my clinical rotation at the VA, the patient's wheelchairs were so nasty (old food, feces, crumbs, general crud caked on them) that I felt bad for the patients. I asked the NM if some of the students in my class could come back the following Saturday morning, take them to the loading doc and power wash them. We did exactly that. The staff were grateful and the patients were too!
Mandychelle79, ASN, RN
771 Posts
I hate checking in patients belongings. I work on a Geri psych floor as an aide and we have to mark patients belongings with names since we wash them on the floor. Patients typically bring in WAY more than 3 allowed outfits. And always bring in things without tags to mark on or everything is Black and we dont have silver markers. Oh and if things are getting put in the safe they have to be charted in 2 or 3 different places.