job duties of lpn

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Am registering for a course possibly

Not clear on this.

Do lpn do potty duty?

Meaning change diapers, do bedpans and clean the bm

Serious here, thanks.

Specializes in Mostly geri :).

Believe me, the incontinent patient would love to be able to, for lack of a better term, wipe themselves. I've worked with a lot of people with a poop phobia, they make enemies fast and don't last long. Double glove?? Pretend you're cleaning up brownie mix?? Have you actually tried to clean it up and been unable or is it just fear of the unknown? Good luck.

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well lucky for me i'll only have to suffer through the poop patrol during clinicals, because once i get my rn i'll do flu shot clinics or anything else humanly possible to avoid feces. meanwhile i will go on immediately to get my masters so i can practice as an fnp... where poop will not be on the program. i guess that makes me a horrible heartless person (insert eye roll) but i find cleaning up feces to be a horrible and disgusting experience. geez, i can't understand all the hubbub this has caused.

you won't only suffer through poop patrol during clinicals. you're going to see it everyday on the floor as a staff nurse, and that's if you make it that far. when it's your mom in the hospital requiring to be cleaned up, i believe your attitude will change if you run into a nurse with your "i have a bsn, i don't have to clean up your poop, let me spend 15 minutes trying to locate a cna who's busy cleaning up someone elses poop to come and assist you. but you will only have to sit in that feces for 20 minutes or so." attitude. would you want your mom lying in poop until that nurse (who is capabable of cleaning up your mom) locates a cna? most likely that cna is busy cleaning up someone else, or assisting them to the bathroom who requires to be watched while up ambulating. but hey it's only your mom.

i just want to comment on your flue shot clinical or anything else "humanly possible" to avoide feces. nursing is about providing care. it requires a lot of heart and compassion, and right now i can see you don't have either. i'm sorry to be brutally blunt, but it is what it is. it shouldn't matter if the patient has poop that needs to be cleaned up. if you're the only one there, clean it up, it's your job. i've had nurses hunt me down when i worked as a cna just to tell me that a patient needed to go to the restroom. that poor patient soiled himself because the nurse spent 10-15 minutes looking for me to tell me. i went over there as soon as i was done and found him soiled. i cleaned him up, and was soooooooooooo embarassed and kept apologizing to the family. i reported that nurse to the don and so did the family :up::up: don't be surprised if the samething happens to you. good luck

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My first thought was go to medical school and become a doctor.

The best NP I've ever worked with cleans poop. She provides care drug addicts in the inner city. They have been known to become incontinent during their visits, or their children arrive wearing dirty diapers. She just cleans them up as she chats to the Mum.

People say I'm heartless, but those posts are just plain callous.

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another question i wanted to ask bigislebound. what are you going to do if you're a l & d nurse, or a postpartum nurse? do you know that they clean poop all day long? those babies poop like crazy, and the moms sometimes poop when they're pushing. poop is everywhere in nursing! i just want to add the fact that you weren't born potty-trained. your feces trickled down the poop shoot and landed on that diaper. it had to be cleaned up, and i'm sure your mom didn't leave you sitting in a smelly diaper full of poop.

i personally hate hacking and sputum, but i have to deal with it everyday. am i going to leave it up to the cna to clean it up because i despise sputum? no way, it's my job! all patients deserve to be treated with respect and dignity regardless if they're incontinent, continent, or full of phlem etc.

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Just like the last post, poop is everywhere.

Nurses deal with impactions, which means you are digitally removing feces from a patients rectum. They do fleet enemas, which means you are flushing feces out of patients rectums. You change colostomy bags, and clean and examine the stoma, also.

Every type of hospital or LTC nursing deals with bed pans and feces at some point. Private duty nursing certainly does also.

Even a clinic nurse will likely be retrieving stool samples for testing.

If you hate poop that much, change your career goals. Either that or get used to poop. Avoiding it won't happen. And flu shot clinics are a mere 4 months a year. You can't pay off your student loans working 4 months a year.

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I have great news for all of you who made sure to let me know I'm a heartless coldhearted person because I don't savor the idea of handling people's feces. I have decided to go into an allied health career instead of nursing. I change my children's diapers and while I don't relish it, I do it because 1) it needs to be done and 2) I love them more than life itself. Random drug addicts don't meet the second qualification... nor does anyone but my kids. From this point on in my life whenever anyone talks about nursing, I'll be sure to tell them that Poop Is Everwhere In Nursing, and if you don't want to wipe up poop then you'd be better served doing ANYTHING but nursing. Congrats on driving an intelligent and hardworking person out of the profession. Cheers.

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Nope, those "random drug addicts" are the population served by many NPs in urban centres.

But thank you for realizing that the sick and ill of this world are better served by you working in a cubicle.

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Honestly, though I am a bit ticked off by being percieved as some heartless person ( I am constantly doing things for charity and am far from heartless) I am actually glad that the truth came out in this thread. I had actually believed it when I was told that the nurse-as-butt-wiper thing was a misperception... which is why I considered a career in nursing. Now I find out that it really is the truth... nurses wipe butts and clean up poop. I wish all of you folks well, but frankly cleaning up poop is not on my list of things I am willing to do for money. Well, maybe lotto jackpot money, but nothing less. That doesn't make me some terrible heartless dictator or something. There are people in this very thread who would just not be willing to... say... work in a senator's office and deal with the crookedness and lies involved. That doesn't mean you are terrible people. I would not be willing to wipe butts, that doesn't make me evil. I am glad to have been disabused of the myth NOW before I spent any more money on pursuing a career that would make me miserable and probably make me puke daily.

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You understood what we were trying to tell you. To finish nursing school you will work on units and deal with ostomies, incontinent adult and children, and if you wind up on a dementia floor you would see some interesting things done with poop, even in Pscyh.

The schools in my area won't let you advance to NP unless you have several years of acute care nursing, and yes that would involve poop be it in an ICU, PICU, L&D floor or even in the OR. There is poop even in the sterilest of places.

We have seen so many posters going "well, I'm not going to work in a hospital, so I won't deal with poop". There are only so many research jobs, flu clinics are seasonal. Dialysis patients loose bowel control at times, baby clinic nurses get faced with diapers and the Mums expect you do it, they just smile at you and take a break.

With the way the economy of North America is today, any nursing job is a paycheque and the "easiest" of jobs are not going to go to a new grad.

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Specializes in Utilization Management.

I'm sorry but you have portrayed yourself as rather heartless in your statements re: cleaning patients as being horrible and disgusting. I, as well as many others, went into nursing in order to help people and if helping people involves cleaning up poop and urine and sputum and vomit, then so be it, hand me some gloves so we can move on. It's not all that nursing is made of, but it is part of it. Even allied health professionals have to deal with poop at times

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Uh... I never said the patients themselves were horrible and disgusting. POOP is horrible and disgusting. That's one reason that the water treatment plant pays so well... it stinks in there and you have to deal with poop. I want to help people... I am a very intelligent person with the grades and standardized test scores to back it up. I could easily have chosen to go into a field that is soley about cash money. Instead I plan to make my career about helping people. We all have our bottom lines, our breaking points. For some people they simply cannot sit in a cubicle, it's soul deadening. Some people hate math and would be miserable dealing with it. I hate poop and I just can't see handling feces on a daily basis unless it were a life or death situatio nwhere there were no other options. I don't think the patients are disgusting and bad, I think POO-POO is disgusting and bad. I don't understand why folks find that so hard to understand.

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I have great news for all of you who made sure to let me know I'm a heartless coldhearted person because I don't savor the idea of handling people's feces. I have decided to go into an allied health career instead of nursing. I change my children's diapers and while I don't relish it, I do it because 1) it needs to be done and 2) I love them more than life itself. Random drug addicts don't meet the second qualification... nor does anyone but my kids. From this point on in my life whenever anyone talks about nursing, I'll be sure to tell them that Poop Is Everwhere In Nursing, and if you don't want to wipe up poop then you'd be better served doing ANYTHING but nursing. Congrats on driving an intelligent and hardworking person out of the profession. Cheers.

You asked for a job description and you got one. None of we nurses savor the idea of handling feces. There are times when CNA's and nurses gag; it's one of the unpleasant tasks healthcare professionals do.

Why don't you consider social work? A social worker helps patients, with no direct patient care.

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