More charting, paperwork and chores than is humanly possible

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I absolutely need your experienced thaughts on this:

Night shift, one nurse, 3 CNA's, 60 residents.

-update allert sheet, make out new 24 h VS flow sheet

-make out new 24 hour report for DNS

-count narcotics with three nurses on three different carts

-obtain report from three different nurses on all 60 pts.

-Check for changes in MARs

-rounds, meds, BS at different times throughtout the night and prn pain meds (of course, there is allways plenty of those chronically dependent pts. standing around the nurses station anxiously waiting for their Percocet at the most inconveniet times, often times chatting your ear off as though wanting to make the "drug transaction" seem more casual.)

- check for BM issues on flow sheets and address - suppositories on MOM

- check, address and note orders left over from eve shift, sometimes order labs and obtain samples (Sure, night shift is slower than other shifts, night shift nurses don't do anything than sit around, so let's just leave it to the night shift nurse)

- receive and file new meds from pharmacy

- check off a multitude of safety checks, ie. that doors were locked, temperatures of refridgerators, crash cart, functioning of suction machines, glucometers. Of course, all of these things should be physically inspected and checked for proper functioning before I sign my name under it.

- check of Oxygen, tab alarms, wander guards on on basically all 60 pts. As a rule, either they have one or the other, if not both.

- sign of inspections of skin issues, O2 sats, cath care, G/J tube care in treatment sheets. Again, all of these things should be physically performed before signing off on them (approx. 20 pts.)

-Charting on pts on allert, MDS, medicare or Hospice, usually amounts to approx. 20 pts.

-Chart all the VS, BMs and I&Os.

- 0600 rounds : more meds, BS on 18 pts.

- Count narcs with three nurses on three carts

- Give report to three nurses

- I'm sure I forgot something and God forbid something out of the ordinary, like a fall, a new skin issue or a death happens.

Yeah, night shift nurses have it made :rolleyes:

I'm new to LTC (not new to nursing) and I am a very fast (yet thorough) worker. In the hospital, I had allways everything done first. But this is humanly impossible. Yet the supervisors act like yes, this all is required by State, this all has to be dome. I think the other nurses must just omit stuff or lie about doing it... How else could it all be done? Wthout superhuman powers IT CAN'T!!!!

...And what is most frustrating to me, where are actual assessments, observation and interaction with pts? (No, not every pt sleeps at night.) The very thing we should be doing instead of checking off boxes and charting essentially that nothing has changed on this pt. since last shift, because the all mighty State (or medicare, or hospice or whoever) require it? :banghead:

Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

I know it's been said over and over again, but welcome to the wonderful world of LTC! :biggringi As a night charge nurse in a nursing home I had the same list of duties. You will learn to prioritize and multi-task these things over time. One thing I recommend you do is check out your pain med people periodically and offer them medication before they have a chance to come to the desk to ask. One of the nice things about nursing home patients is that a good many of them thrive on a regular schedule, including when they want their pain meds.

We have to chart on Medicare residents every shift. Not just the front check-off, but a narrative. This accounts for the majority of my units charting each night. We chart on Medicare in addition to the incident and change of condition charting. V/S on each and every one, too. Sometimes it can be as many as 20 per night.

I can get frustrated when it appears that the general assumption is that we are twiddling our thumbs on night shift so they add extra stuff for us to do. In the past week have had added to our list of things to do on 11-7 : Audit all 4 med carts and reorder any necessary drugs twice per week. Clean with disenfectant all bedside equipment once weekly, and the most outrageous of them all: necessary "housekeeping" for instance, if someone on day shift notices that Resident X's bedside table is cluttered and dusty we are instructed to clean it,(they are leaving a list for us at night to clean). I draw the line at housekeeping. I'll do what is necessary for infection control and safety such as empty garbage cans, and clean up spills, but I refuse to dust furniture. There are paid housekeeping staff on day shift to do this, and I refuse to do it. They can fire me.

Your assignments sound all too familiar and it really is a ridiculous load. God forbid a nurse have intentions of doing things in the appropriate way because it really does seem to be a losing battle and sometimes doesn't seem to win any favor among your coworkers. I just love it when I get the whole attitude from other shifts that I've done nothing all night and should be able to clean up the assorted messes left behind with a smile upon my face.

I'm still amazed that some of the staff members are able to make it night after night seeming to do nothing other than make an appearance. How do they manage? :rolleyes: I think people like that are at least partly to thank for the multitudes of busy work.

Don't forget to do the census, make a new handwritten assignment every night that is exactly the same as the night before, clean the fridge, and get those residents outside to smoke just 15 minutes before shift change. Did you order meds and make sure all of the quarterly assessments are up to date? :nono: Just kidding.

Up until about a year ago we were required to chart on skilled q shift. The rule required only QD, but the idea was that someone wouldn't chart and if it were q shift at least one entry would be made. I haven't seen q shift in a long while. The way I've seen it done now is that it is all split up into assignments for various shifts. We did chart on hospice q shift but that was very short lived. At the moment I chart on new admits, ABX, incident follow ups, behaviors, and any sort of c/o, etc.

Specializes in Gerontology, Med surg, Home Health.

I've worked in several different places and they were all sure they had it "right"...one place was charting q shift for 72 hours, then BID for 14 days, then daily after that...no wonder it didn't get done...it was too darned confusing. The regs are pretty clear and we've never been challenged: Q shift for the first 72 hours and then daily after that for a Med A, or Managed Care patient. We also chart q shift 72 hours after an incident...always felt silly charting on a tiny skin tear 3 days after it happened. We don't chart daily on our Medicaid residents. Some of them are so stable we just chart weekly vitals on the MAR and do a monthly summary.

I'm still amazed that some of the staff members are able to make it night after night seeming to do nothing other than make an appearance. How do they manage? I think people like that are at least partly to thank for the multitudes of busy work.

There is a nurse on the adjacent sub-acute unit of our facility, that I have sofar NEVER seen work. I have seen him eat (every day, they have delivery pizza, chinese or some other goodies on that unit), read, make endless personal phone calls, engage in long deep conversations about relationships, making prank phone calls to me over at my unit, just because they're bored over there, I have even seen this nurse watch raunchy videoclips (I know, I was just as apalled as you are now) and sports games on his personal laptop. He's perfectly open about it. He says, all they care about anyway is a warm body. They just want to be able to check off, that they had sufficient staffing. And he gets away with it.

Now I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, granted they have a significantly lower pt:nurse ratio and he has been there for quite a while, so I'm sure he has his routines down to a tee and granted he might be able to cut the time to a minimum... and I'm definatly not the one to deny anyone a break, if they can afford it. I would love to get a break once in a while. I would like to be able to read a magazine for half an hour, or even read the histories of my residents!!! Yeah, that would be great! But I have never ever gotten a lunch break there yet. Sometimes I can't even get to the bathroom. I don't know what he's doing and how he's getting away with it, but I certainly feel like I can't afford that luxury. Not that I would be so worried about management. In a way I almost understand him... maybe he went through similar frustrations as me in the beginning and this was his solution to the problem, however wrong it may be. I'm kind of suspecting that he's partially right about the warm body theory, but I feel like I can't afford this sort of leisurly attitude for the sake of my credibility. I feel like I would definitely loose any kind of proffessionalism that I acquired through hard work in nursing school and then in a hospital...

By the way, this leads me to something else - I think I can say this as an LTC nurse now: I've heard LTC nurses bashing hospital nurses before, how they don't care about the patients (as opposed to LTC nurses who LOVE their residents dearly) and how their residents allways return dissheveled from the hospital ... I'm pretty sure, I have even read threads about this here before. In my two years of full time in med surg, I have never seen this kind of redundancy, waste of time and spinning of wheels due to double and tripple charting and absence of time to pay actual true attention to the patient - all that providing you want to "DO A GOOD JOB", adn / or such a laxness and carelessness, providing you "DO NOT CARE" about your performance. Yeah, in the hosp we had only six pts each, we were bussy, but the perscribed care was actually given in every instance to the best possible standard. Assessments, treatments, medications - the most important things were done, orders taken off and charted on on every pt on each shift EXACTLY as prescribed by doc.

I don't mean to stirr any kind of controversy with this, even though I have a feeling I might be doing just that with this statement, but I'm just a nurse in the process of proffessional transition and I'm just trying to make sense of all this. :uhoh21:

Specializes in LTC, sub-acute, urology, gastro.

Welcome to LTC :eek: ! My unit is chaotic now, our facility is without a DON (the previous DON hid in her office, even the ADON wondered what she did all day, which turned out to be nothing), the social workers have "integrated" the units by mixing short-term rehab, sub-acute & Alzheimer's/dementia patients all together (full beds=$$$), the CNAs are having a union issue & literally stop working right after lunch (can be seen in dining room with book open, head down & eyes closed while the aromatic smell of urine & BM wafts through the air, the alert short-term residents are yelling at the wandering Alzheimer residents who grab at their cup of juice, tab alarms & call bellls going off like crazy, families present). I work 7-3 :chuckle & this is my day...

Arrive at 6:45AM, do a resident check, count narcotics, take report. Some days I do charge, but regardless I take the 11-7 nurse's report because my co-workers don't stroll in until 7:30AM. After report I plead with the CNAs to stop eating their breakfast & give the residents breakfast, check the calendar to see who's going out to an appt. & start the paperwork. Then at 7:30 I give the actual charge nurse the report & start my medications for my as of this afternoon 26 patients (51 divided by 2 nurses, 6 CNAs). I gather all my creams, lotions & potions that can be applied by the CNAs during AM care & leave in the residents room. I do my insulins (7 with standing 8AM doses), start the nebulizers (16), & start popping pills. The interruptions are unbelievable - from the unit manager who just rattles off a million things that she herself or the charge nurse or the unit secretary/stock clerk should & could be doing, but hey, I'm just standing around, right? :rolleyes:, to the call bells, other staff, etc. In between popping pills I'm doing B/P's & apical pulses on 20 of these residents, not to mention oxygen sats on 17 of them (3 of them before they I CAN WHEEL THEM OUTSIDE TO SMOKE, & LET'S NOT FORGET TO BRING THEM BACK IN TOO), of course post smoke they need another O2 sat, O2 &/or nebulizer tx. I save my GT's for last (only 4 thank God), do my 2 residents colostomy care then go to lunch (tried to time this better but just can't seem to) at 11AM. Get 45 minutes for lunch but only use 30 minutes because I have 9 fingersticks with coverage to do before lunch is served at noon. I give meds during lunch, a no-no but there's no other way beacuse after my 1PM meds there's wound care to be done! Yes, that's my job too! Our charge nurse does care plans, specifically 1-2 a day. Paperwork if we get a discharge or admission (I would have to do the actual assessment though) & some misc. stuff the unit manager doesn't throw the med nurse's way (when I do charge I do all the wound care, renewals, MD orders, care plans & as much charting as I can). So I re-stock the treatment cart because it's another specialty of mine & off I go. I do my mobile residents first, several skin tears on the arms or legs, or protective dressings for the heels. Then I do my resident with the gangrene to the left foot & the 3 stage 4s on her buttocks & sacrum, then I have 4 others with multiple stage 3-4's. Wound care is one of my favorite parts of the job, I just wish there weren't so many to do during this crazy time. By now it's 2:45 - 3PM so I make sure my MAR & TAR are completely signed, all PRN meds accounted for, syringe count, narc. count, med re-orders to pharmacy done. Now it's charting/renewals/MD order pick up time. Remember, the charge nurse does care plans. Only. Now during this charting you're being interrupted by manager, dietary, PT/OT, recreation, resident's families, residents, supervisior & the unit secretary who still can't remember the difference between a nebulizer mask & O2 mask. The 7-3 shift now does the medicare charting, the other shifts chart on ABT, incidents/falls for 3 days, new admits 3 days & as needed, as does the 7-3. I usually don't leave before 5PM & still don't get it all done. We're due for our state survey any day now & it's gonna be soooo bad :chair: New DON is scheduled to start right after survey, I'm going to give it a month to see if there are any changes, if not I'm hitting the road. I love LTC & my residents but it's just too much work in an out of control & dangerous atmosphere. Sorry so long!

Welcome to LTC :eek: ! Sorry so long!

Yep, I pictured the day shift to be something like that... And I don't want to work it exactly for the reason that on nights at least noone is yapping my head off (most of the time). I also refuse to stay OT longer than half hour to one hour (have little kids at home and hubby needs to go to work in am.)

Yeah, doctor's office sounds just great right about now. And I miss the hospital too... But I ain't givin' up yet... :)

Specializes in LTC, sub-acute, urology, gastro.

I think it's just LTC :chuckle , because I started on the 11-7 shift & it was a rare night that everyone slept peacefully. The other shifts think that 11-7 sleeps all night too but there's plenty of paperwork & cares to do also. I love that the admistration & other depts. are not there though so I still do an occasional 11-7 shift - it's a nice break. I've worked at doctor's offices but just found it too dull, but dull is looking good because of all the OT. I hope the work load gets better for all of us! :)

That sounds like my first nursing job, I often left in tears after finding CNA's hiding in the closet. I have since moved on and my current job has been wonderful (usually). Just don't give up on LTC please

I've been told that we have to chart on medicaid, MDS, Hospice and alerts every shift. Did I misunderstand? Does charting VS in the VS section count?

At our facility we just have to chart on pts with antibiotics, medicare charting is done during the day.

Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
. . .and the most outrageous of them all: necessary "housekeeping" for instance, if someone on day shift notices that resident x's bedside table is cluttered and dusty we are instructed to clean it,(they are leaving a list for us at night to clean). i draw the line at housekeeping. i'll do what is necessary for infection control and safety such as empty garbage cans, and clean up spills, but i refuse to dust furniture. there are paid housekeeping staff on day shift to do this, and i refuse to do it. . .

i just wanted to point out that a lot of housekeeping departments specifically tell their cleaning staff not to touch patient's bedside tables. the bedside tables and over bed trays are the realm of the nursing staff and that is why most nursing staff are given the responsibility of keeping them straightened up and cleaned. treatment supplies and all kinds of other medical stuff such as nebulizers and suction machines are kept on them and housekeepers are told not to mess with them. they don't know how they work or what is ok for them to handle on them. it's also an infection control issue. a housekeeper is not trained to distinguish or make a judgment about what tables have treatment or medical supplies on them and which ones don't. intelligent ones might pick that up on the job, but, in general, they don't have the training to make those distinctions; it is not a part of their job duties.

actually, i believe the cleaning and straightening up of bedside tables and over bed tables is part of the am care. the patient is right there to direct someone as to what they can touch or not touch. at least, that is what i was taught in nursing school.

I just wanted to point out that a lot of housekeeping departments specifically tell their cleaning staff not to touch patient's bedside tables. The bedside tables and over bed trays are the realm of the nursing staff and that is why most nursing staff are given the responsibility of keeping them straightened up and cleaned. Treatment supplies and all kinds of other medical stuff such as nebulizers and suction machines are kept on them and housekeepers are told not to mess with them. They don't know how they work or what is OK for them to handle on them. It's also an infection control issue. A housekeeper is not trained to distinguish or make a judgment about what tables have treatment or medical supplies on them and which ones don't. Intelligent ones might pick that up on the job, but, in general, they don't have the training to make those distinctions; it is not a part of their job duties.

Actually, I believe the cleaning and straightening up of bedside tables and over bed tables is part of the am care. The patient is right there to direct someone as to what they can touch or not touch. At least, that is what I was taught in nursing school.

At my facility the treatment tables for those resident's who have them are covered at all times unless the suction, nebulizer, etc. is being used. The bottom cabinet portion where various tx supplies are stored is kept locked, with the key on the key ring with the med cart keys for that particular unit. Keeping this table clean and clutter free is a nursing function, just as keeping the med cart and actual tx cart is a nursing function. The tables I was referring to in my previous post are the actual bedside tables where kleenex, flowers, and the resident's personal knick knacks and photographs, etc. are kept. Of course, I will throw away empty cups, juice cartons etc. as a courtesy to the resident, but I don't want the actual cleaning of the room to become a nursing function. We don't have time to do that.

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