I work the night shift. There are 2 aides for 60 residents, 95% of whom are incontinent. We have to get up 6 residents, which is usually not a problem. THere are other night aides who start getting people in their chairs at 2am and they sit til breakfast at 7:30, without being checked or changed. But the day people love those aides, they don't have to do half THEIR job in the morning when everyone is up all night. I don't believe in getting folks up in the middle of the night, to sit immobile and wet in their chairs for 5+ hours.
So if I do have extra time or they are short handed (4 on instead of 5), I will make an effort to get some extra people up. But only for those aides who are at least polite to me in the morning. The ones who come in and b!tch no matter what, they don't inspire me to do anything extra for them. It's always 'why didn't you get more up?' instead of hey thanks, I appreciate your help.
Today one of the old cranks on that hall (not my normal section) refused to get up. He was dressed, laying in bed and can transfer himself if you hold an elbow. All she had to do was point him to his chair. Not b!tch at me 'well I don't feel good anyway, you just go home, I don't give a sh!t'. Yeah, I'm totally going to help you with extras. She was an hour late yesterday and is one of the laziest workers to start with. And it totally honked me off this morning to end on that note.
I guess my rant is why can't people be at least polite to the other shifts?? I know that everyone thinks the others don't do anything but come one, we all have our hard times. I'm not likely to start going out of my way to do more for the b!tchy ones and that only makes it worse. I know that but I'm not going to stick my head out more than once when it gets smacked on. If people would be at least civil to the others, the day would go much smoother!
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?
What you described is, unfortunately, a very common occurrence in LTC. First of all, keep reporting it to management. I don't know specifics about your facility, but most of the time, even though it seems management isn't doing anything, they may be doing things behind the scenes that you are unaware of. Most places are afraid to fire bad CNAs because of lawsuits, etc., so they have to thoroughly document specific cases of employee neglect and such. In effect, they are "building up a case" against them before termination. They may even have counseled these employees and made them aware that complaints were made; they, however, are obviously not doing well at following-up on them and ensuring those CNAs are doing their jobs correctly. Then, again, they may not be doing anything at all. You might keep a record of when you complain to management: who, what, where, when, why, etc. Just don't put anything down that would violate HIPAA. :)
I don't have an easy solution to your problem, and like they say, "there's more than one way to milk a cow." I would straight up tell the CNAs "It seems like it's a bit early to be getting Mr. So-and-So out of bed and dressed." Can you take the charge nurse with you and show him/her exactly who hasn't been changed and show her the sopping wet briefs? Maybe remind her she has a license that she would like to keep and then try to instill the wrath of the BON in her heart? (maybe not that last part)
If this is a dodgy place and the situation just isn't being rectified, you should consider job-hunting. There is no excuse for a facility to allow these practices to continue and force you to take up the work of other people. Stay strong!
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.
We used to be like that before a few months ago. Our DON, after hearing many complaints, decided to catch them (not all the cnas but some were doing it) in the act one night while they (including nurses) were using the computers for personal usage, meanwhile dayshift would find all of their residents so filthy the next day...so she started assigning tasks to them. We also have to do "walking rounds" now. Basically, during shift-change, the dayshift does a round with evening and signs off on it...the evening does a round with night...etc, etc. It's tedious but it's solved some issues in our facility. No one wants to explain why their people are soaked to the next shift coming in...
At my facility, there does seem to be a lot of pointing fingers at different shifts. I just perform my job the best way I can, and remain respectful to my co-workers. No need for unnecessary tension.
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.
CoffeemateCNA
903 Posts
What you described is, unfortunately, a very common occurrence in LTC. First of all, keep reporting it to management. I don't know specifics about your facility, but most of the time, even though it seems management isn't doing anything, they may be doing things behind the scenes that you are unaware of. Most places are afraid to fire bad CNAs because of lawsuits, etc., so they have to thoroughly document specific cases of employee neglect and such. In effect, they are "building up a case" against them before termination. They may even have counseled these employees and made them aware that complaints were made; they, however, are obviously not doing well at following-up on them and ensuring those CNAs are doing their jobs correctly. Then, again, they may not be doing anything at all. You might keep a record of when you complain to management: who, what, where, when, why, etc. Just don't put anything down that would violate HIPAA. :)
I don't have an easy solution to your problem, and like they say, "there's more than one way to milk a cow." I would straight up tell the CNAs "It seems like it's a bit early to be getting Mr. So-and-So out of bed and dressed." Can you take the charge nurse with you and show him/her exactly who hasn't been changed and show her the sopping wet briefs? Maybe remind her she has a license that she would like to keep and then try to instill the wrath of the BON in her heart?
(maybe not that last part)
If this is a dodgy place and the situation just isn't being rectified, you should consider job-hunting. There is no excuse for a facility to allow these practices to continue and force you to take up the work of other people. Stay strong!