I can't make them understand....

[propertyguy]

A couple of more things, thanks for the patience, I am new here...the main problem we have at our facility is that our employees are not trained appropriately when they are first employed. ALL of our new hires are 90 day temporary employees, and it is incredibly difficult to get them to understand the importance of their job, or to care about it as much as some of us that have been here for years. One of the most important things they will do while they are here, from a safety standpoint is the Admission search process. I have written a very thorough policy on that and on searching visitors bags, luggage, etc., that they bring in with them, but so far it is like they do what they want. I personally watched a visitor be allowed to take a suitcase to one of our units, and the employee just let them take it up without searching it at all!! The Nurse Managers know about it, and do nothing. I am basically low on the proverbial totem pole, so there is nothing I can really do about it. In todays society, I do not feel as if this can continue forever without something very bad occuring. I am preparing to teach part of a NVPCI class on Monday, and plan on including cases where patients, staff, or others have been injured and Supervisors or Managers were held responsible and sued because they did not make their people follow already existing policies. I have found some (very few) cases online where that exact thing happened, can anyone point me in a directionwhere I can find more cases of injury and who was held responsible. Anything helpful would be great. I am just trying to get through to them and nothing else has worked. Thanks so much.

[GingerSue]

Just a couple of memories of dangerous incidents that occurred while I worked in psych. One individual was known to always bring an exacto knife whenever he returned from his daily pass. Therefore he always had to be searched upon his return. One day he got through the door and got mostly to his room, with staff accompanying him trying to determine - where is it this time, meanwhile he had now started cutting himself and once in his room, there was blood spattered all over the walls, until staff (me there too) had been able to get the knife from him.

Another occasion, a male patient came to me and showed me his large knife (what was he planning to do with it?)

Another patient, I found dropping lit matches into her bedsheets. I kept searching to find the book of matches, and kept asking "are there any more" - where do they get them from, they know they aren't allowed to bring them in? Several days later, at 7:45 a.m. while we were having report, I went across the hall for some reason, and saw this same individual in the hallway and there were flames from floor to ceiling. Another nurse and I got the firehose out of the wall and I had called a code red. We couldn't get the hose to supply water, but we did get the fire put out, and the patients evacuated. I asked the patient why she had started this fire, and she replied that she had taken down the curtains in her room and dragged them all the way around through the back hallway, and set them on fire in order to distract staff, so that she could escape.

My point of this is that people will bring these things into the unit, they will use these items dangerously, they aren't using very good judgment, many people could get hurt. Staff do have to make sure that these kinds of items are not brought into the unit.

[danu3]

. I have found some (very few) cases online where that exact thing happened, can anyone point me in a directionwhere I can find more cases of injury and who was held responsible. Anything helpful would be great. I am just trying to get through to them and nothing else has worked. Thanks so much.

Contact the Stanford Health Library:

http://healthlibrary.stanford.edu/services/library/libraryresearch.html

They have trained staff who can look things up for you since they have access to many internal databases (which costs an arm an a leg) that Stanford has. I know they have access to psych related databases also.

-Dan