If a patient wants something but an RN says don't do it, whom do you follow?

Nursing Students Technicians

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There was this mini-issue (not even an incident, really) that happened at work, and I feel a bit troubled by it.

OK, so I was caring for my unit's patients as the only nursing assistant one day and there was this one total care patient on our unit who'd been complaining of pain after his physical therapy exercises and was obviously quite unhappy about it. I let the nurse know and she got him some pain meds.

Easy enough, right?

But then the nurse went out to lunch and she had another nurse on the unit (I'll call her 'Replacement') look after her kids. So later on I went back into the patient's room, and the patient said that he was in '10 out of 10 pain' and he wanted to call his dad. So I pick up the phone and start dialing the number for him.

And then right outside the door, Replacement is there and she says ''No, I'll call the nurse and I'll call his parents first!'' I felt a bit angry, because the patient wanted to complain about his situation to his parents, but the Replacement was focused on pre-emptive damage control, She told me out of the room that his parents "freak out" and she'd talk to them first so they wouldn't. It seemed very dishonest, and I started arguing with her, but she abruptly said that she wasn't arguing with me any more.

I don't particularly care about that RN anyway but I felt so bad for the patient. Should I have disobeyed that nurse and called the patient's parents for him? Obviously I left the patient alone and let the Replacement take care of it, but I felt it was all so unethical and 'cover-up'-y. I'm not sure what I should have done. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Specializes in Transitional Nursing.

"I can't discuss that with you for privacy reasons" if that's the case. But generally I'll explain.

I've never had this said to me. I'm just curious, what information would you not be able to share with the CNA involved in direct patient care? Is it different with children? We look in the charts, careplans, Kardex, etc where I work. The nurse usually gives us report on a new admit so that we have the information we need including any co-morbidies, barriers and dx.

I've never had this said to me. I'm just curious, what information would you not be able to share with the CNA involved in direct patient care? Is it different with children? We look in the charts, careplans, Kardex, etc where I work. The nurse usually gives us report on a new admit so that we have the information we need including any co-morbidies, barriers and dx.

Social history that is in no way relevant to their current treatment needs, that sort of thing. And no, I don't work with kids, so it isn't specifically about that. There's not often that it would come up - I know you guys need to know what's going on with them in order to provide proper care. In fact, I don't think it's ever come up. But there might be circumstances where it was necessary, so included that caveat.

Specializes in Transitional Nursing.

oh okay :-)

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