Name a stupid policy/idea your facility thought would fly

BearishBob · May 6, 2012

Our management had plans to fire everybody in dietary and have the nurses make all the food in little kitchens on the unit. I told my NM, "I hope everybody likes hotpockets and juice". Thankfully this was never implemented.

Having no seating for charting sounds crazy. I sit maybe 1 hour while Im charting if Im lucky, and my feet are grateful for it. Id probably quit if they took that away. Did they lose a lot of nursing staff?

pockunit, ADN, RN · May 6, 2012

So these central lines are totally uncovered and you're pouring the fluids directly into them, right?

ThePrincessBride, MSN, RN, NP · May 7, 2012

No, what she says is true. I still work for same facility. Here's another one: require OB scrub techs to be in the facility even when there are no labor patients, but without even getting on/call pay. I kid you not.

Isn't that illegal?

tokmom, BSN, RN · May 7, 2012

I work on a busy OB rural unit (no MD/CNM on site/demand). They took our ward clerk away, no OB techs, and then started to make us do our ordering. So we had to answer phones, order supplies and put them away, all while doing nursing care, sometimes on people delivering babies in the hallway! We finally go them to get us someone to keep our department stocked, but our new manager of almost a year now is still fighting to get us a ward clerk/OB tech.

The brainiacs that took the supply person away should be ordering AND restocking! :mad:

tokmom, BSN, RN · May 7, 2012

I do remember that! And although I sit on the RN union negotiating team, I wrote to all our staff about how this was a very bad precedent, probably illegal, and that facilities commensurate to the techs' homes should be provided while they were just hanging out. Oh, and that they were to be called only if OB needed them.This was actually the demand from a doc, who no longer works there, part of a group who recently bailed....you porbably know her, too, tokmom.

Yeah, I bet I do! :mad:

tokmom, BSN, RN · May 7, 2012

Our management had plans to fire everybody in dietary and have the nurses make all the food in little kitchens on the unit. I told my NM, "I hope everybody likes hotpockets and juice". Thankfully this was never implemented.
Having no seating for charting sounds crazy. I sit maybe 1 hour while Im charting if Im lucky, and my feet are grateful for it. Id probably quit if they took that away. Did they lose a lot of nursing staff?

Ok, so this post made me laugh. I could just see boxes of hotpockets and capri sun juice boxes. A regular diet would get one hotpocket and a juice. A mechanical soft, would get a smashed up hotpocket. Full liquid a blended hotpocket with juice mixed in.

Clear liquid would just get the juice box.:rotfl:

DeLana_RN, BSN, RN · May 7, 2012

I think the housekeeper/phlebotomist policy is going to be the winner... However I do have a "good" one to share. A certain hospital that I worked at for a short time stated that their nurses were perceived as "lazy" by the general public. To improve their image, the management decided that nurses (and nurse techs) were no longer allowed to sit down during their shift unless they were lucky enough to leave the floor for a lunch break (which almost never happened) or using the restroom.
The nurses' station was closed down and all the tables and chairs on the floors were removed, except for a single card table with one chair, a computer, and a phone for the secretary. The nurses were issued zone phones to carry, and portable computers with instructions to do all charting in the patients' rooms so that they and their visitors could "see you working". The nurses were also issued locater badges, to track were they went on the floor and how long they spent in each patient's room. (to make sure they weren't "sitting down being lazy somewhere") To add further insult: there was a room set aside for physicians to dictate and review their charts and sit down with tables chairs and computers, but it was only accessible with a physician's ID badge.

:lol2: I don't know if it's sleep deprivation after 3 tough night shifts, but I can't stop laughing at this... the stupidity of management knows no bounds! However, were they at least consistent - i.e., take the manager's chair out of her office so she would not look "lazy" to doctors and visitors?!

* * *

I don't have much to add (at this time, maybe when I'm more awake), only that one of our managers thought it would be a good idea to place an ad for a highly-qualified unit secretary/housekeeper. Yes, the unit secretary (several years experience required for PRN status with no guaranteed hours or benefits) would be cross-trained to clean rooms. I wonder why no one applied :rolleyes:

DeLana_RN, BSN, RN · May 7, 2012

My former hospital decided to treat NG and G-tubes as sterile lines briefly and instructed people to scrub the ports with alcohol for 15 seconds prior to accessing them, use only sterile H20, use a new sterile syringe every time, throw away the rest of the bottle of sterile H20 (they were 60 mL bottles and we'd be using like 10 mL to flush these tubes in these kids) after using it once, etc. Almost no one complied with it and then they realized that the evidence didn't support any of it and spent as much time and energy rescinding the policy as they did creating it. Now they get mad when people use sterile H20 for anyone other than oncology or transplant patients because of the "budget".

Where did these managers go to nursing school (or did they even go?!)

:rotfl:

wooh, BSN, RN · May 7, 2012

only that one of our managers thought it would be a good idea to place an ad for a highly-qualified unit secretary/housekeeper.

I wish our nurses had the power of our secretaries. Or at least their ability to stick together. One year, during a particularly high census, housekeeping decided they needed help, so a mandate came down that at discharge, our unit secretaries were to strip the linens in the room and take the linen bag to the dirty utility room. The secretaries complained, and it didn't happen. Now if that mandate had come out for the nurses to do it... I guarantee I'd still be stripping linens after every discharge.

R!XTER · May 7, 2012

Houskeepers drawing blood...**Shudder** That is the grossest most unsanitarty thing I can think of. Imagine a housekeeper cleaning a toilet of a patient with c-diff or MRSA and then moving on to draw blood on the next patient...yuck!

Boog'sCRRN246, RN · May 7, 2012

A former facility thought they could multi task the housekeepers by having them be lab techs. If they were in a room cleaning, they could drop their mops and get a few vials of blood for us. That lasted about a month before it was thankfully stopped.
I remember watching them learn to draw blood. They were given a 30 min tutorial on a rubber arm.

I'm surprised management didn't take it a step further and have centrifuges and other lab equipment installed in all the housekeeping carts (they are big enough, after all)- labs could be run on the spot and on the go.

blondy2061h, MSN, RN · May 7, 2012

Our management had plans to fire everybody in dietary and have the nurses make all the food in little kitchens on the unit. I told my NM, "I hope everybody likes hotpockets and juice". Thankfully this was never implemented.
Having no seating for charting sounds crazy. I sit maybe 1 hour while Im charting if Im lucky, and my feet are grateful for it. Id probably quit if they took that away. Did they lose a lot of nursing staff?

Man. Now I want hot pockets. And I don't have any. Sad.