MAS

I could use some advice. I worked for this family as a pediatric home health nurse for over a year. I ended up leaving when the mother became irate at me over a suction catheter that went missing, getting right in my face and began spitting as she was shouting at me. She then threw a ben of suction catheters on the floor and left them for me to pick up. I finished my shift, charted the altercation in my narrative and informed my supervisor the following morning that I would not be back. This was on a Friday. I got a call on Monday and was accused of showing up late to work, but clocking in on time. The system automatically clocks you in at what time you're supposed to be there, so we're talking about maybe minutes. Over the course of a year, this amounted to about $140 and did not give credit to the times I showed up a few minutes early or stayed a few minutes late. I admitted to the mistake and paid the time I was overpaid back and thought I was done with it. I've since quit the company and moved on to hospice nursing. This was back in June and I just received a letter from the board of nursing essentially accusing me of stealing company time and being unethical and they're asking for a response in 30 days. I'm pretty devastated. Has anyone been through this? What can I expect? Any advice on attorneys?

I'm a pediatirc nurse who works PRN for a home health agency and recently I had a horrible encounter with a patient's foster mother. My patient was trach/vent/g button, and the mother spent the entire 12 hour shift belittling me and criticizing everything I did. The shift started with her drilling me on this patient's plan of care. "What's the patient's trach size? where's the spare trach? how do you set the machine up? what if the machine isn't working? where's the ambu bag? Diapers? Meds? Doctors phone number? foster parents phone number? spare g button? etc". In between her drilling me, she criticized everything I was doing saying things like " you're not positioning the patient right, you didn't set the machine up in the right order, you're supposed to do CPT before you give nebs (I was always told to do it during nebs or after, but we didn't have an order for CPT anyway), etc. I literally couldn't do anything right by her standards all shift and she was so consistent that I couldn't even chart and had to chart everything down when I got home. It finally boiled over when she saw that I had moved a padding that she put on the floor out of the way because I was tripping over it and she said "if you ruin my carpet, you're f*cking paying for it"! I told her that I was dumping the water from the vent tubes on the padding and there was no water on her carpet which she didn't believe me. I told her she could feel for herself and she said "there you go, being a smart a*s, you must not like your job very much!" I didn't say a word to her the rest of the shift. When the morning nurse came in, the patient began to de-sat in the high 80's, low 90's and the foster mother immediately began blaming me and making really obnoxious comments like "who gave you a license?", etc. Thankfully, I contacted my supervisor after my shift and I don't work for that patient anymore; but I was wondering if anyone had experienced something like this before and if so, what's the best way to handle it?

I'm currently working for a home health agency as a BSN-RN and my clients are very dissatisfied. The problem is there are no other agencies that service the area we live in. We constantly have problems with staffing, scheduling, and customer service but because of where we live we feel powerless to do much about it. I work with 4 other nurses and we were complaining about basically doing all the work and wondering why we even need a nursing agency. We do everything from writing our own schedule to providing our own supplies while the agency sits back and gets paid. We were wondering if it's possible to open our own agency or just bill medicare/medicaid/tricare directly and not bother with an agency at all? Has anyone ever tried this? What were your experiences and how would we get this started? Thanks in advance!

That Guy. So looking at her course work, would you say that the material was more difficult to learn or there is just more of it? If you two were to switch places, do you think she would have an easier time in BSN school than you would in LVN school?

That was kind of my thought. I failed both of my pharm exams, and one of my OB exams technically (you have to average a 75 on an exam to get a "C"). It feels almost like taking calculus without knowing basic math. I'm so far behind on everything, and the ones who seem to do well already have some sort of medical background. I have nothing but love and respect for LVN's, so much so that I want to become one; but my ultimate goal is to make my way back to being a BSN. I hate the fact that I invested so much time and money to get this far, but if I keep going down I really feel like I'm not going to succeed.

I'm a father of two, a husband, a full time worker in an unrelated field, and I live 45 minutes away from school one way. I'm drowning in BSN school and I'm thinking about dropping out. I want to go back to school and get my LVN, and maybe go back to get my BSN. I most definitely bit off way more than I can chew, so my question is this. Is an LVN program easier in terms of course work, harder in terms of course work, or about the same in terms of course work? Right now I'm about a 2.9 average in school, but I currently have a "D" in OB and Pharm. Prior to nursing school, I had a 3.82 GPA.