NurseWayne

Thanks. I haven't found anything that addresses the question I posed, though.

Was hoping that someone can convince me that I'm over doing the social isolation part of this. I work in a nursing home in Oregon. Both skilled and LTC. I have a girl friend and we each have our own place. My question is, should I be spending time with her? The way I see it, if I spend time with her than I'm exposing myself to everyone that she's exposing herself to. And I've decided to make a special point to avoid contact with people whenever possible. When I mentioned this to her she said that married couples weren't forced to be separated. The difference here is that I actually have my own home and there's no relocation needed in order for me to do this. But it also seems unfair to us for me to impose this on our relationship. So my question is, am I over doing it by thinking that I should not spend time with my girlfriend until this thing blows over? Am I the only person considering this?

Report the patient? I don't see a need for that. The issue is more with my boss. I work in a small town and losing this job would be a financial hardship. In the end I think I just need to bite the bullet and speak to him about it.

I would argue that as long as your were completely objective in your report it shouldn't be a problem. Patient's have a right to their medical record and I would assume that would include visits to the school nurse. Now if you had written something in the report that isn't objective like "it wouldn't surprise me if the teach hit this kid" then that would certainly be cause for concern.

I work in Oregon. Fortunately I just found out that the Oregon Board of Nursing doesn't permit me to prescribe to people with a known abuse issue. So I'm going to use that as a reason with the owner of the clinic as to why I can't prescribe to these people. Hopefully I won't get fired but at least I have a valid excuse now. It's so unfortunate that we're in this situation to begin with. The government should just make laws preventing anyone from prescribing to people with known untreated addictions.

Wandering if I could get the perspective of other providers. I'm relatively new (three years out of school) and finding a good job isn't the easiest thing in the world. Landed in a clinic that serves primarily Medicaid and they do pain management. In and of itself not a big deal. But I had a patient who was getting 10 mg Methadone QID and tested positive for cocaine. Second positive cocaine test. I would have thought we would discharge her but instead the owner would like for me to just reduce the narcotics we give her. Big picture I don't think that she's going to stop suddenly if I discharge her or go into rehab. I also don't think anything bad is likely to happen as she's been at this dose for a long time. Still, this just seems like it's asking for trouble. I'm just wondering how much trouble a person can end up getting into working in this situation. Does anyone know of someone who lost there license or got a reprimand because of something like this? Just trying to gauge how much danger there is for me here.