Hi there, I have to bring up an incident that happend last night on my shift. I have this patient who was newly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer w mets to brain. Patient went from being independent to complete care within a matter of days. Patient did not tell family about her cancer so the family was distraught when they heard. Anyways, right when I got on shift, daughter was screaming for help to help her mother because she was vomiting. I addressed her concern and called doc for new orders. Told daughter ill be right in when I receive complete report on patients. Gave pt meds and daughter apologized for being so out of hand. A few hours later she comes storming out of the room saying no one is helping her mother and she vomited. In my head im thinking ok she JUST vomited a second ago, second of all you did not ring the call bell so how are we supposed to know your mom is vomiting? Third off, if your mother is needing this much attention while your sitting in the chair next to her, completely capable of helping her then maybe you should help. So then she whipped out her camera phone and started to video record what was going on by putting the camera in her mothers face saying "this is how they left my mother! No one is helping her" she then points the video at me and the aides and says "look what they are doing, they arent even helping and this is what the nurse is doing". I had the aides clean her up right away. Explained to her we are working as fast as we can.
so One of my co workers called security and i did not know that there was such a policy regarding video recording or pictures being taken. Security came up and explained to her the reason behind the issues of privacy and security asked her to delete the video. She refused to delete it so security told me they need to call the police. So they arrived and in the end she cooperated and deleted the video. I told nurse supervisor and she spoke with daughter and told her she wanted a diff nurse (which shocked me cuz she was so nice to my face and so thankful for my actions early in my shift and i asked if she needed anything to call for me, so my conclusion is she is mad that it got taken to the point where police were involved and she probably didnt like someone young telling her what to do). I switched patient with another co worker.
I needed to vent because I kind of feel violated. I did my very best to reassure the daughter that if she needed me to let me know and the fact that everything i did do for her mother is now disregarded. It was so inappropriate for her to invade my privacy and act so irrational. Is there something I could have done better? How would you have handled it?
