I have been a pediatric nurse for nearly seven years. For the first five years of my profession, I took for granted that I never had to act on my mandated reporter status. I worked in a large pediatric hospital and we had social workers and a child protection team that did the dirty work.
I don't have any of that at my current job. And working inner city, I definitely have a higher population of patients who have, shall we say, social concerns. Somewhere around 10-20% of my caseload has open cases with our state's CPS. Well, things got VERY out of hand with one of those cases this week. There have been ongoing concerns in this house for some time. Things get better then they get worse. Without going into too many details, this week marked the 2nd and 3rd times that a significant volume of a controlled substance that the child takes went missing. Last month, 1/3 of the bottle just went missing. This week, someone obviously had diluted the bottle with water or with God knows what to try to throw me off as they are aware that I look at the volumes every time I'm there. I filed with the state because of this given that I had no idea what was added to this bottle (water? rubbing alcohol?) or what whoever did it's intentions were. Was that person trying to take some of this medication for himself and then just replacing the volume hoping the nurse wouldn't notice? Or was someone trying to hurt this child with what was added to the bottle?
They actually did respond and were granted legal custody of her but for reasons no one outside of the department understands, they left physical custody with the family. Well, they confiscated the bottle that was tampered with when they went in a few days ago and arranged for the family to get a new supply (no one believed me that just giving a family that steals this med more was the worst idea ever). And what do you think I notice today when I go over there? There's already more than 10% extra missing from the bottle. When I reported this AGAIN they basically didn't want to hear it, despite the fact that the agreement they came to in court yesterday specifically stated that if any further discrepancies were noted with this medication they would immediately remove the child from the home.
This is in a state where CPS has been under fire lately and FOUR kids have died under their care/due to their failures since December. UGH. Worst week ever. I thought last week was bad. After this week, I don't remember why.
