shift wars in the middle of report.

[evolvingrn]

Sigh......so our facility has acute care and ltc. I am hired for the acute care but when out lpn has the night off we take turns putting in our time . last night was my night. there were 20 pts are so. There is a lot of paper work to do that is left for the nights which takes several hours so i am busy throughout the night regardless of how the pts are doing. so there were several pts (five or so) that hadn't had a bowel movement in 4 or 5 days.all of them had gotten MOM on days with no results. for the two pts with scheduled suppositories (who were included in the five pts with late bms) I gave them. one i had to wake u p and it was upsetting to her. the other i found awake so i gave it early so i wouldn't have to wake them up. The others i told the cnas to tell me if they woke up and i would give them a suppository. nobody did. one did wake up and i had to do a full bed change on him but i didn't do that at that time because it was right at shfit change and we were rushing..

Anyway during report....there were three lpns (to my one person) coming on and when i was given last bm she started berating me for not waking them up to give them a suppository. she was being very aggressive. so finally i stopped report and said "im sorry your frustrated my thinking was that if they woke up i would give one but otherwise it was more appropirate and respectful to wait for when they were awake to do the intervention . she then made a snarky comment that " she thinks its very disrespectful to leave someone without having a bm for 5 days) (this is my first time working there in over a month) I stated nicely that we were going to have to agree to disagree about what was appropriate. She basically told me she was going to report me. I don't work ltc and on the acute side while we do intervene we just don't get excited about bms like this. I would never wake someone up to do a suppository. am I completley wrong ?

[handyrn]

Sorry if I misspoke. Sounded like maybe it was the policy. And, WOW, 6 patients per nurse in LTC? That's awesome! I am used to being in a nursing home where we were one nurse to 30-40 residents! I guess she had plenty of time to do the suppository! Sorry you had to be the target of her behavior. She probably thought you were an easy target since you were not so familiar with how they do things.

[pbilbrey]

When I did ltc long time ago it was day 3 that something was given. So all the other shifts drop the ball before you. IF you work there again you will know give it no if asleep or not. If you go off shift at 7am at 6am grab the aids and say lets go do turns on these peps I need to give a supp.