notifying pts the night before visit

[BabaLouRN]

The agency that I work for wants us to call the patient the night before the visit. I have tried this many times and on only one day did it work. Other days, the scheduler always calls me with a change of plans to do a SOC or ROC that needs to be done that day. Then, there I am having to recall all the patients to tell them I have to make other arrangements and change the time or the person who will be doing the visit. I rarely have a problem calling them around 9:30 which by then, the scheduler will have already called me

[berube]

we are "suppose" to call the patients the night before,,,i just give them a 2 hr window of time and that usually allows for those changes.

[paddler]

I too wait until the morning of to call them for the reasons mentioned by the OP. If I spend half an hour arranging my schedule and get a call the next morning from the scheduler wanting me to fit someone in, I feel I may as well not call until the next morning craziness is out of the way. And, yes, 9:30 is usually sufficient.

[Isabelle49]

I call patients in the morning. I see alot of the same patients each week, so they are used to seeing me on their certain day. Another reason I like to call in the morning is that some patients who are very forgetful will agree to the time then insist you never called them, lol. Some nurses and therapists don't call at all and I think this is very disrespectful.

[Sue Damonas, BSN]

Do you get paid to spend time calling patients the night before or are you expected to do it on your own time?

[caliotter3]

Do you get paid to spend time calling patients the night before or are you expected to do it on your own time?

I have a colleague who does this for her other job. I can't imagine wasting the amount of unpaid time that she does on a daily basis. I asked her about this and she states that it is necessary.

[tewdles, RN]

When I was in home health I did NOT call the night before for the very reasons mentioned...it was too common to have my schedule changed by the scheduler with NO notice to myself (I would get up and look at the software to sometimes discover that I was seeing a completely different list of pts)...and they would not pay me for the "planning time", so I opted out of planning.

[RN1263]

I also don't call patients the night before. My schedule is always changing, if it didn't change so often I would call the night before, but it's impossible with the way things are right now.