Hospital Auxillary Staff...

[SOCRATES SOUL]

as agency staff i work between 2 hospitals and a multitude of wards and have been observing the attitude of auxillary staff such as the cleaners, porters for transfers, patient services assistants etc etc and i must say that i am disgusted at times by half some of thier attitudes to their jobs and us nurses.....

if i offend anyone i apologise but some things just need to be said and to hell with politeness and political correctness.......

i have seen most of them are old dinasours that cant be put to pasture, they are unionisticaly ruled, they may not speak the best english but by hell they know how to say smugly "thats not my job" when it bloody well is...........i have witnessed many cleptomaniacs and feel powerless to stop them.....how dare they, because 'they can' and management refuses to acknowledge the rorts and deal with it effectively....i have seen ward supply milk, bread, biscuits, cleaning items etc etc stolen by them and it sickens me........

they can be rude and surly, tantrum prone, uncompliant and possess an outright imature attitude to their work and designated responsibilities and not working with in a team, they misguidedly think they are above us at times,that they have the most important jobs in the hospital i have witnessed many flat out and rudely refuse to do something that is within their job descriptions and a fair request by the nurse and the nurse shrugs her shoulders and goes to do it herself...this is not on and this reinforces their menial attitudes...

now i am only refering to some, of course i value anyone for the work they do no matter what it is, any work deserves respect is my attitude, there are many wonderful and helpful ones out there no denying and i treat and greet them all upon arrival but the things i have experienced and witnessed in a stressed nursing environment are outright rude that would have any of us nurses hauled up to the terrace to 'chat' over 'coffee and croissants' with management.....

examples?? a patient was crashing on the nightshift and the usual abgs and other bloods were drawn and when the surly ward assistant was asked politely if she could run them to pathology stat her response?.....the infamous "its not myyyyyyyy job, meeeeeee bussseeeeeeeee now"......i beg your pardon?? she says this whilst she is 'busily' sticking little paper bags to patients bedside tables for use as mini wastebins for their personal use....'real important' stuff..... then what exactly does your job entail?? stealing ward stock, making a multitude of personal phonecalls, socialising with your workmates over extended breaks?... we did the best thing and reported her as i will continue to do about every surly one i encounter in the future..........this is the stance we as nurses have to take we did not work and study as hard as we did to be told off by some two-bit unionistically ruled and uneducated moron.............. ... i sound harsh but ive had it with incompetence, rudeness, sullenness, surliness and unwarranted refusal and i did say that to hell with politeness and pc!!..:chair: they seem to have more rights than we do as professionals due to our catspiss union and believe me there have been a few that i have pulled over quietly and hisssssssssed at them.....

one cannot escape form the fact that we nurses do everyones job............

at one of the hospitals i cover they have wardsmen that are specifically employed to shower dependant male pts.and quite frankly i have told many to their face that i wouldnt even let them wash my dog........ and i mean it...the way they work would make a blind man cry so i stick to my guns and do the work myself no matter how heavy mr jones may be.........they have done everything from attempting to lift with no help or lifting devices bilateral akas, to pulling out cvc lines (omg!!) and ngtubes to an idc, to inflicting massive skin tears to outright dropping someone to outright refusing to do a shower they have been asked to do because they have deemed that pt 'unfit' to be showered by their 'profound nursing assessments'....henious stuff........thats only the tip of it i would be here all night and i gotta get some zzzzzzzz.... and the saddest thing is that management are fully aware of the injuries and damage they inflict but their heads are up their orifices about them and do not deal with any of them at all accordingly.... here here for patient care!!.........and it is no wonder that some pts have genuine complaints about the way they are treated by some members of staff....things have to change and i am going to start making some noise rattle and hum!......... my patients deserve this advocacy i believe cause many are too scared to utter a word you will find if you get them talking..........

thanks for the vent and lets post some henious examples of outright disgusting behaviour we have witnessed by auxillary staff and what does your management do about it if anything at all............

[sjoe]

The problems you describe are management problems. Just to pick one out: the ward assistant, for example. For all the reader knows she has in the past run such errands (or been told not to by HER boss) and then been criticized for being off the ward or for not getting her bags all done by the end of that shift because she was "off running around", etc. If transportation is not in her job description, it is NOT her job. or is this a job for lab? or for someone else? In that facility I don't know, but it is management's task to assign needed tasks to the appropriate person.

When "we nurses do everyone's jobs," we are only asking for more work to do while those people who are assigned these tasks can take breaks (and complain to their bosses that nurses got in their way or called them names or criticized them or whatever).

Management has no incentive to do anything about it so long as nurses fill in all the gaps (meanwhile perhaps not spending adequate time and energy on their OWN tasks and certainly having a negative attitude toward fellow hospital workers).

So, unless you are paid as a manager, IT'S NOT YOUR JOB to "fix" these things.

[ruthless]

hi sjoe, u have raised a very good point here - and one which is perhaps often overlooked because as nurses we tend to run our backsides off doing everything which is asked of us - rather than looking at perhaps delegating/refusing to do those tasks which we shouldn't be doing or else just get pushed upon us. one of the main reasons for this is that because we are often so swamped with trying to deliver care in understaffed/underresourced work environments, AND because we are the only members of the healthcare team that are always there with our patients - it puts us in a position where it is often difficult to say no...even when the reasons are right!. i have found that on several occassions - i have gone well and truly out of my way to do things that i sit back and think - why the hell did i do that - but i just haven't had time or energy to battle it out with others. we need to become more assertive and as you say - check our job descriptions against what we actually do - i think some of us will be in for a rude shock!

[BadBird, BSN, RN]

I could not have said it better, too bad that not everyone thinks that patients should come first. If there is no aide for the shift or no secretary then the nurses are expected to just do that work too, no wonder burn out is so high. It is best not to get involved in the politics, you will last longer.

[sunny1973]

Socrates Soul,

I couldn't agree more. I have seen the same things in some staff at my facility. It has nothing to do with their educational level, rather their attitude about their job & life in general. Have you tried speaking with their manager? or your Nursing Director?

One extremely short-staffed night, I watched as an experienced NP come up to my unit to see a patient. She noticed that the floor behind the nurse's station was dirty, as well as other parts of the unit. I was afraid she would demand an accounting from me, but I was too busy to try & locate our cleaning staff and ask them to do their job that night. Instead, she promplty got on the phone with the owner of the facility. She related how she was "sick & tired" of dealing with rude, lazy employees who couldn't handle the basic requirements of their job. Then she specifically named several individuals in the housekeeping & security departments who "need to be fired" and enumerated all the times she had seen each employee sleeping on the job, responding rudely to staff or customers, etc..... She got her wish. Now the floors are sparkling clean in our unit.