Slow nurse response time is a danger to pt health

applewhitern, BSN, RN · Sep 9, 2011

Call the hospital administrator or the supervisor on duty. Since hospitals are being paid according to patient satisfaction scores, they will be very interested in the quality of care Granny is getting.

CVmursenary · Sep 9, 2011

Well this may just be a failure of the system in which the nurse works in. Do you know what your grannys blood pressure was?; maybe it was held for some reason. A blood pressure medication and a narcotic can lower blood pressure below a safe level.

applewhitern, BSN, RN · Sep 9, 2011

There is no excuse for not taking care of her while she was vomiting.

Orange Tree · Sep 9, 2011

While my Granny was on the hospital I noticed that all if her nurses take nearly fifteen minutes to respond to any call. While sitting with her through the night she began violently vomiting. I pressed the call button, asked for her nurse and it was nearly an hour before she strolled around and asked if the vomiting had stopped.
Another example: at 20:00 she said a doctor had ordered antibiotics, a pain killer, and a bp medication. She gave the pain meds, and never administered the other drugs.
How do I go about getting another nurse? This is a serious danger to My granny's health, she'll die of a heartattack before the nurse gets around to giving bp meds.

Let me guess? You're not a nurse?

kcksk · Sep 9, 2011

Well the BP med could've been held because it was due to start at 0900 and be daily and if her BP wasn't high, they wouldn't give it at night. They could've been waiting for the antibiotic to come up from the pharmacy or it, too could've been a daily drug and maybe she had already gotten it in the ED earlier in the day if they had just come up from the ED. Did you ask why they didn't give it? Honestly don't know about the vomitting. I usually run in and check my pt when they are vomitting and make sure they are ok. Sorry about your experience. When your Granny was vomitting was something else going on, maybe a code or something? Feel free to talk to the nurse about your concerns or the nurse mgr. Hope your Granny is better.

Murse901, MSN, RN · Sep 9, 2011

First, let me say that it's a great thing that you are an advocate for your grandmother's safety and welfare.

Having said that, I have a very hard time believing that ALL of Granny's nurses suck, as you've ascertained. Sure, there are some nurses that suck. There are some CNA's that suck. There are some doctors that suck. When someone tells me that "all of (insert a class of people here) suck", then there is one common denominator. I'll let you figure it out.

I also have a hard time believing that it took the nurse an hour to "stroll" in to check on a vomiting patient, unless you meant that she gave the patient medication and returned in an hour to re-check. Any nursing student knows that a vomiting patient could aspirate, which will leave them with a dead patient if not checked. Again, there are some bad nurses out there, but even bad nurses know that they're not supposed to let their patients die and will, at the very least, send a CNA or a helpful AUC in to put eyes on the patient and give them a puke bag.

I believe that some key details are missing from this story, and if you're coming to a nursing forum to complain about all nurses without giving the whole story, you're going to get some resistance.

If your story is accurate, then you should be in a nurse manager's office immediately. The fact that your first inclination was to come to an internet forum is very telling.

mama_d, BSN, RN · Sep 9, 2011

Obviously, your gran is your #1 priority. It's possible she did have a nurse who sucks, but it's even more likely in my experience that she had a nurse who was doing the best she could with the assignment she had.

When you say it took nearly fifteen minutes for a response to the call light, are you talking about the amount of time it took for it to be acknowledged at all, or the amount of time it took for someone to actually come to the room? If the latter, fifteen minutes is not out of the ordinary...if the former, that's an indication that they were probably understaffed.

Did your gran have anything ordered for vomiting already? If not, it might be that the nurse had to call a doc, wait for a callback, get an order, wait for pharmacy, and then check to see if she was still vomiting. You'd be amazed at the number of times patients don't have appropriate PRNs ordered.

It's also a possible scenario that they had something going down with another patient that required others take the backseat for a while. Vomiting isn't fun, but generally it's not life-threatening...if there were pts who were in potentially life-threatening situations, they would come first, and you'd never know a thing about it.

Like I said, it's possible that her nurse just sucked. But I wanted to throw in the above to let you know that it's entirely possible that there were things going on behind the scenes that you don't know about.

My advice...ask in a non-confrontational way about it. "I was concerned about some things that happened last night and was wondering if you could explain them to me."

CrunchRN, ADN, RN · Sep 9, 2011

Here we go again. :smokin:

kool-aide, RN · Sep 9, 2011

I don't buy it… :yawn:

OhioCCRN, MSN, NP · Sep 9, 2011

Dont be so quick to judge OP.

Nurses have a lot on their plate.

Please remember that it is a hospital with other patients, not just your granny.

As much as it is frustrating not to have someone on your beck and call, take time to understand that something much worse may have been happening to other pt's.

DeeAngel · Sep 9, 2011

You speak to the charge nurse and tell her you want another nurse assigned and why.