NM_CNA

At my LTC facility CNAs aren't required to have CPR certifications. They recently had a class for it and when I enquired about it, I was told that I could not attend because it was "for nurses only". I can somewhat see why the facilty would be upset because of liabilty issues. But when someone's life is in danger are you supposed to just sit there and watch them die??? I find it odd that your facility doesn't have an intercom system. All we have to do here is get to the nearest phone and announce the code over the system and every nurse in the building is mandated to stop whatever they are doing and get their butts to the specified room.

Update: It's been what, three months or so since I posted about the night shift aides? I kept reporting it. Still, nothing was done. The specific resident I mentioned's wife was complaining to me one day. I asked her if SHE had been reporting what was happening, and she said she had but nothing was done about it. I confessed that i had also been reporting it with no results (I wondered if that was appropriate for me to say but I didn't and still don't care that I said it because something needed to be done about it.) and suggested that she also go to the DON and to the administrator with the other family members that had been complaining. If that didn't work, I told her about state inspectors and ombudsmen. She went to the DON and all they did was move those aides out of that pod. One of them was recently employee of the month. He has been getting lots of complaints from the residents of the pod he was placed on. She thanks me everytime she sees me but I know that all I got accomplished was to move the problem to a new set of residents. I guess I CAN be thankful that those CNAs were placed on skilled units. The residents there only stay a month or so for rehab so at least they don't have to put up with it constantly like the other residents did. I've pretty much given up on trying to get anything done. I do my job, clock out and go home. Obviously nothing is going to change. I'm glad that my daughter is due soon and I can leave this horrible place and not look back. **EDIT Thank you for all of your suggestions. Several other aides had questioned the night aides about what was going on, but they leave the pod as soon as we clock in so it didn't help. Other family members had also had it out with some of the night aides (actually asked them to step outside and yelled at them) to no avail.

Speaking of privacy curtains: Our facility's beds are at an angle and are almost impossible to move around in-- especially when you have a patient in a wheelchair, a shower chair, and a lift in the room. There's no way I could close a privacy curtain (they only cover up the bed) to keep people from seeing the full monty when I'm transferring. Last year when State was here, several CNAs got "dinged" for not having privacy curtains closed for this reason. The state inspectors didn't knock when they entered the room and walked in on a resident on the lift. It's also hard to have a privacy curtain closed when you have to give a bed bath here. You don't even have room for a tray of soap and water (unless the curtain gets soaked) with it closed. Why don't they move the curtains to allow for more privacy and add a curtain in FRONT of the door since no one seems to want to knock? We're not magicians here!

lol. I worked with someone yesterday that has been a CNA before, took a year off, has been working at my facility for two months, and is still "confused about taking blood pressure". Two of us tried to show her, she still had trouble. I didn't know what to do, I just gave her a cuff and a stethoscope and told her to go practice.

What do you guys do when you see that other aides aren't doing their jobs? There are four aides that work our night shift here that NEVER bed check residents. As a result most of them are experiencing break down. These particular aides have also removed certain resident's call lights out of the wall enough for them not to work, but they are kept in far enough to where the alarm doesn't go off. Several of us report this (almost daily) to the nurses, but nothing is ever done. A very sweet resident of ours has been exhausted a lot during the day, so I questioned him about it. He told me that the night shift aides have been sitting in his room during the night and watching his roommate's TV. They have also been getting him up and dressed around 2-3 AM. I told him that all he should have to do is request to be left in bed longer, but the resident told me that he'd rather get up than be left with wet pads all night. I went straight to my supervisor and detailed all of this to him. Nothing happened. It's been a month of reporting all of these things to different people and I have no idea what to do. These aides are friends with a lot of the nurses. The DON won't follow up on any of it either, the administrator just tells me to tell my nurse. We've had a lot of people quit this month because of it. Who do I contact that will do something about it?

Night shift is the same way where I work (LTC facility). This is the only CNA job I've ever had, so I assumed that all night shifts were the same. At my facilty, they are required to do nothing more than bed checks and getting some people up in the morning. And there are some, no matter how many times they are reported, that do not do bed checks. We come in and most of the beds are stripped with the urine and bm soaked linens thrown in the corners. Too bad our facilities aren't like some of these poster's! I would be happy if night shift did any of those tasks! It's too hard for day shift to get all of those done and do good patient care.

Oh gosh, same thing happened at work today. Except it was the administrator that went around telling us to "make them get up and go to church". 1. There's a stomach virus going around, so most of them were in bed with vomiting and diarrhea. 2. Most of them don't want to go to church. Since when did old become synonymous with religious? 3. If the administrator wants us to make them go against their will, then HE should be the one making them. Why do the CNAs always have to play the bad guy? It sickens me.

Where I work, they just do bed checks (some of them do, at least) and get some people up. I wish our facility would have them do other tasks. The ones you mentioned, such as cleaning the shower rooms, microwaves, and wheel chairs, scrubbing lifts and organizing rooms and closets- fall to day and evening shifts. Actually, mostly day shift has to do it all. We frequently come in and see that night shift has been doing crossword puzzles, playing cards, and listening to music all night. I thought most facilities had similar set-ups. Apparently ours is just crappier.

I recently got written up and suspended because of an issue with a family member. A resident in the Alzheimer's unit (known for throwing away her dentures, taking off her brief, pooping on other resident's beds and smearing it all over the walls, etc) had lost her dentures. My partner that day and I looked everywhere for them. Our lunch time came, I left, and when I came back from lunch, my partner went on break. While she was gone, this particular resident's daughter came in. She asked me where her mother's dentures were. I told her how we had looked for them and couldn't find them. She was ****** off. A few minutes later, it was time to pass lunch trays and my partner came back from lunch. The daughter stormed out of her mother's room, holding her mother's dentures, screaming at me. She called me lazy, she called me a liar, she got in my face. My partner had found her dentures while I was at lunch. The resident wouldn't let her put them in, so she put them in their cup in the bathroom cabinet. My partner tried to explain this, multiple times, to the family member, but she ignored her and kept yelling at me. I was dumbstruck. I apologized for the confusion, but she kept yelling. So I just kept passing the trays for lunch. The nurse had come in to pass meds in the middle of it, and she just ignored the whole episode. I asked her to talk to the family member, and she told me to just keep my mouth shut. The family member went to complain to the administrator that her mother had been neglected, and I was given three day's suspension to appease her. I hate where I work.

I think it's most annoying when you say things like: "I think maybe its your attitude towards your job.Can you maybe try to get to know your residents a little better,take the time to listen to them and maybe this will help.I know CNAs have lots of duties and little time..." I can't remember the last time I got to have an actual conversation with one of my residents. The point everyone is trying to make is that you "help out" but it's a CHOICE you make to do that. You can always choose not to and just sit down with a resident and have a nice chat and get to know them. I don't have that choice, because there's a call light going off or a shower to do. When I decided to apply to become a CNA I thought my day would have a lot more fulfilling things in it, but it seems like all I have time for is cleaning poop.

We have a policy against saying it as well. Most of the time, the residents have already figured it out. If they ask, I don't have a problem telling them. I've been b!tched out by a resident for taking too long to answer a call light (1 of me, 20 residents) on a bad day. And I don't see why family members calling state should be a bad thing. Maybe state needs to see it so it gets fixed. It's not fair to the workers or the residents to have 1:20 ratio, 5 call lights going off, and 4 nurses chatting at the station.

I rarely see a doctor around my work! And when he does his "rounds" once every couple of months or so, he literally checks them by touching their shoulders while he walks by chatting with the nurse. "Yup, still alive! My job here is done!". It's pathetic.

It IS possible to get them all up without having to start at 2 am. Our night shift is required to get 14-18 people up. They leave the hardest ones down for us. Night shift gets paid more, they just do bed checks at night. We come in, have to get people up, feed right away, then have two hours to toilet 20 people, do 5-6 showers, get most of them stripped, laid down, then have to get them up for lunch, do peri, redress them. I don't see why night shift shouldn't get people up.

I'm 24 weeks pregnant, and if I were to tell that to my LTC facility, they would make me take a mandatory unpaid leave until I could lift again. They don't care if you're pregnant. We've had locked down pods because of a sick virus and I've had to work in them. I've had to help transfer morbidly obese residents. Either that or my rent doesn't get paid.

It's when someone has been working with you for a month straight, with the same residents, and STILL can't figure it out that it gets annoying.