My choice or required

Specialties Private Duty

Published

With a patient with a low mental age and immobile am I required to play with toys, read, dance around and entertain him all day. My case manager is flat out ignoring me about it and fixing to go to the next person above her to get my questions answered. A couple hours of choice play seems more effective than 12hours of forced constant interaction. If they want him read to 3 hours a day should they pick up a book? Seems like Medicare isn't expecting me to do that, or are they?

Specializes in Pediatric Private Duty; Camp Nursing.
...but also took care of three dogs, two cats, shoveled the driveway for the next nurse on duty, plus much more. Live and learn.

This past December I lost an entire two weeks of work because I refused to do post op care on the client's dog after her spaying. It was the client's dog, so of course they assumed all care was part of her ADLs I needed to do. I had begrudgingly fed and cleaned up after that dog all that time, but in this situation, they wanted me to give her pain meds, and also take the cone of shame off twice a shift to allow the dog to feed, and then put it back on, and to "be careful she doesn't bite out her staples". I was not comfortable with this and told them so. Her 18 year old sister did the care of the dog that shift, then I ended up with a vacation until the vet took out the staples two weeks later. The agency stood behind my decision so I didn't get in trouble w them, but they still had no problem sending other nurses who were quite okay with performing veterinary post op care in the meantime. I really felt backstabbed by those nurses.

Specializes in Pediatric.

These type of cases are always very trying- it's part of the reason I had to leave home care. I encountered so many of these types of parents. I'm sorry, but it seemed that parents either wanted the nurse to do either a.) what is being described in this forum or b.) sit still and do nothing in between meds and treatments. Any type of activity for the nurse was out of the question. Ugh!

Ugh-ing right along with you!

Literally all of this. I don't mind playing with my patient intermittently--but that's certainly not what I'm there to focus on. Especially when patient has seizures, I have a mountain of paperwork to complete, so I kind of HAVE to do it. I can do it while still providing the patient with attention-I'm THAT talented. They literally want me to do nothing else besides just sit in front of patient and "play" with them, which mostly includes patient throwing things at my head and crawling at the speed of light across the house to destroy something and me begging them to go back to just throwing things at my head. Letting me do anything medical is pretty rare. I get excited to change a diaper for gods sake!

You guys are are making me feel better about my current position here.

Specializes in Pediatric.
Literally all of this. I don't mind playing with my patient intermittently--but that's certainly not what I'm there to focus on. Especially when patient has seizures, I have a mountain of paperwork to complete, so I kind of HAVE to do it. I can do it while still providing the patient with attention-I'm THAT talented. They literally want me to do nothing else besides just sit in front of patient and "play" with them, which mostly includes patient throwing things at my head and crawling at the speed of light across the house to destroy something and me begging them to go back to just throwing things at my head. Letting me do anything medical is pretty rare. I get excited to change a diaper for gods sake!

You guys are are making me feel better about my current position here.

Yup. I just could not do it any longer.

+ Add a Comment