Scolded for using PPE with C. diff patient

[jha256]

I'm doing my first clinical rotation in chronic care for my ABSN program and I've run into an issue with the facility that I'm concerned about. I'm wondering if any of you have had similar experiences and could give me any insight. There is a patient at this facility with C. diff, so contact precautions are posted outside of her room and there is a cart with gowns and gloves. As students, we learn to gown and glove every time we enter the room as a precaution to protect ourselves and other patients. One day, one of the staff nurses asked me and a classmate to help her with wound care on this patient, so we began to gown up and she told us we don't need to as long as we aren't toileting the patient or doing any peri care. We gown and glove anyway because that's what we've been trained to do and it's all fine, until the director of nursing walked by and saw us in gowns. She laid into us pretty hard about how we're wasting resources and it's unnecessary to wear a gown when caring for this patient. The director of nursing told a couple of classmates putting on PPE before entering the room of a patient with a MRSA infection the same thing. She also complained to our clinical instructor and tells her to make sure we stop "wasting resources". Our clinical instructor determined that this is unsanitary and unsafe, so she told us we should not enter these rooms at all and defer care to a staff nurse if they're going to yell at us about using proper infection control precautions. A classmate who is a LPN and has worked for the company that owns this facility told us this facility has previously been fined and denied new admissions for some period of time because of this very issue. To me, not wearing PPE and reprimanding students for using it seems like a hazard, but is this common in long term care? And is it acceptable? Does the state need to be made aware? I'm not very familiar with the legalities here, I'm just concerned about the safety of these patients.

[Banana nut, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

Call Joint commission and OSHA and just let them know your experience. They take this stuff very seriously.