AnabelRN

That's great Lisa! Thanks for the update. I'm so glad it turned out so well for you.

HA!! Thank you, I needed a good laugh!

Chop chop chop! My hospice, the one I've posted about before that's going through a Medicare probe and has gone from a census of 200 to 80, let 14 people go yesterday. One more resigned today. They let go the entire call team (I was part of that), the home health aid supervisor/scheduler, all the admissions nurses, the weekend LPN, two social workers, and some others. This means that the case managers are going to have to now do their own admissions, schedule their own HHAs, and take call for 3 counties every night and every weekend. I hear the administration has been having to borrow money to pay everyone's paychecks. In a way I'm glad to be out of there but I'll miss the job. Just thought I'd update!

I agree, and that's exactly what the social worker said also (about asking her to elaborate). She did try to expound a bit but it was right when the body was passing by us, so there wasn't really an opportunity to really get in to it. No, it wasn't about that. He started talking about how they were all family there and then went on about how many brothers and sisters there were and who was the baby and all that. The whole time he was talking, I was thinking about what he'd said before and wondering what he meant by it, so I didn't really fully process the rest of it. I definitely would do things differently if I had it to do over. And the social worker gave me some helpful tips for next time. I will learn from this and try to be more sensitive to how I am perceived, and I will take every opportunity to observe and learn about the ways of other cultures and families, and not be afraid to ask questions. I just thought that if I remained neutral, calm and quiet, (and myself), that it would get me by. That I would just sort of blend with whatever situation I happened to be in. I guess it doesn't work that way and you have to be more proactive. Perception is reality, and if the family perceives that I am not compassionate, then that is their reality and I need to change something. I did feel "bullied," but never unsafe.

OK, so I'm pretty new here and I certainly don't want to ruffle any feathers but I would appreciate it if I could get some honest and candid answers/comments from you guys. And I'm sorry in advance if parts of this post and some of the terminology are not PC. First, let me preface my story by saying that I don't consider myself to be racist and actually last year I filed a written complaint to the powers that be in my hospice regarding the way that some of our black patients who live in "bad" areas are treated. For example, a patient we had who was with us for 3 or so weeks was never visited by a case manager, never visited by social work; the only visits she got were from PRN nurses or on call nurses (me). She lived in a bad area. This happens over and over and over. Anyway... Last Thursday during my on call shift I went to the death of a black man. I had taken on-call phone calls from the daughter a few times over the previous week so I was familiar with her. I went to the house when I got the call that he'd died and it was around midnight. There were 40-50 people there, inside and outside the house. I'm not bothered by crowds and I'm used to being the only white person around. It's just part of the job. No family has ever made a big deal about it either; mostly people are just greatful that you're there. Things were going fine until a very obviously inebriated family member, one of the sons of the patient, walked into the kitchen where I was sitting and said, "Look at you, sitting there with all these black folks around you." Everyone (more than 20 people in the room, I counted) stopped talking and looked at me. I smiled and tried to brush it off. He walked towards me and told me he was trying to relax me and got really close and I forgot what all he said after that. His brother finally stepped in and distracted him. Later, as the funeral home was putting the body on the stretcher, another woman commented to me (as the rest of the family started singing and wailing) "we don't do like white folks do." Then as the body left the home, the family began screaming, hollering out. People were falling over. After the body was gone, the daughter who I'd spoken to quite a bit was being escorted back into the home. I touched her on the arm and told her I was sorry for her loss, to take care, and to let us know if the family needed anything. She nodded and walked in the house. So today I got a page from my manager saying she needed to meet with me in person about this death visit. She said the family had complained about me. I talked to their social worker and she said the family had said that I was not as compassionate as the other hospice staff that had been out there, and that they didn't know that I'd left. Sorry if this has been talked about before but are any of you ever made painfully aware of your race when you do your job? What are some things you do to bridge the gap when the cultural and behavioral differences between you and your families are so great? The social worker suggested that maybe I could have had the family gather around in a circle and had them sing and stuff. My instincts were telling me that they wanted to do what they wanted to do, and I was an intruder. I just don't feel like I can add anything or be of any benefit in those situations. Do any of you feel that way? Am I way off? Have any of you ever experienced anything like this?

Oh, my gosh this is happening to my hospice too! The Medicare probe, I mean. I haven't had time yet to read all of the responses to this thread but what an eye opener this is! I work for a non-profit agency. Our census has dropped from over 200 in the beginning of last year to just under 80 right now. Our executive director as well as the woman below her have left. Seems like almost everyone else in the agency has cut their hours to part time. My manager told me this week that "rumor has it" that my position (weekday on call) will be eliminated by next week. :angryfire She's an idiot. Anyway, I'm so glad I found this site! Our unfortunate situation has always been advertised to us by the powers that be as sort of a "poor us, what did we do to deserve to be all but cut off from Medicare" and now I realize (duh) that it was the agency's mismanagement and not following clearly outlined Medicare rules that got us in trouble. Those money hungry a-hole b%$#&*ds are about to cost me my job!

Hi Lisa, this is my first time posting on this board. I am currently doing 4 12-hour night shifts during the weekdays, 7pm-7am, on call for hospice and get paid $54K plus mileage. I only cover one county. I think what they're asking you to do is rediculous. That's too many hours on call. I also think that what I make for what little work I actually do is rediculous. My (not so bright) manager called me while I was on maternity leave a few months ago, desperate to try to retain her case manager RNs, and offered me the position. Previous to me doing call, the case managers were having to do weekday night call in addition to case managing during the day and turnover was awful. I have also done weekend call and it was much, much busier. I've never done both weekend and weekday call at the same time. The weekend call people at our hospice do every other weekend, all weekend, and one day a week of call (16 hours) and make a full time salary. Our hospice used to have a census of over 200 but now we're down to about 80 and I have had many, many nights of no calls at all. It just all depends on how well the patients are being managed and how anxious the families are. What also has decreased the number of calls we get is that we opened a hospice center, and a lot of the high-maintenance patients end up there. Do you think if you asked to do 2 or 3 12-hour shifts during the week (and have the case managers pick up the rest of the shift, like the 4:30pm to 8:30pm part), and still did your weekends, they would go for that? That seems more reasonable to me. Then at least you'd have every weekday evening with your family.