Topics About 'Long Term Care'.

Basically, on the 3-11 shift, I am the only one left in charge to handle emergencies, family concerns, and personnel issues. Close to ten years in this position, now with iron clad nerve fiber, intestinal fortitude, and a sense of humor, there is not...

She lies in her narrow nursing-home bed with eyes closed and feet elevated on pillows, looking much like the little girl in the faded black-and-white photographs she showed me that first day in her new apartment. In her pink fleecy oversized pajamas ...

Take Ed, our resident Oscar the Grouch. He's a World War II vet who also worked as a train conductor; his manner is gruff, and his language is often as colorful as the Oregon Ducks cap he wears. He enjoys nothing more than to wheel himself about the ...

Not every long-term care nurse chooses LTC as a profession. Sometimes, it chooses us. But no matter how you've arrived at your first job in a nursing facility, there are challenges awaiting you that you didn't anticipate, especially if you're coming ...

Geriatric residents are major fall risks because of forgetfulness and dementia. A syndrome called "Sundowner's" is prevalent when someone is lucid during the daytime hours but as the evening hours progress they act "bonkers". Many a time while respon...

On this particular night my patient, I'll call him Ray, approached the nursing station with his headphones in his ears and his big black glasses on. You know, the kind they give you after you get your pupils dilated. He wore these, with cotton balls ...

It is a question I am often asked whenever I meet new people. After the how-do-you-dos are said and the subject inevitably turns to "what do you do?", I almost always get sympathetic looks and comments on how I must be such a saint to work in a nursi...

But let's not forget the CNA's; they really work hard and do a great job keeping the residents/patients clean, dry, and happy! I feel my time as a CNA was an important part of my nursing experience and enhanced my career. I started as a CNA at age 22...

Working in rural areas has its challenges, especially when working in a long term care facility in the middle of nowhere. I was a new RN grad and full of enthusiasm, even though I was in my late thirties. As I scanned the local job listings and word ...

You get out of bed, unsteady, dizzy...where am I? How do I get out...must get out, this door that door? A long dim corridor full of brown doors, where are they, where are they?! Someone coming, someone in white, more white.....talking at me. What is ...

Nursing homes are finding this new method of bringing residents to a dining room setting to be very effective in managing weight loss. Part of my supervisory responsibilities on a 3-11 shift was to oversee the dining room, assisting anyone in need, a...

I peek into the night-light lit darkness and she sees me; The plaintive voice whispers, the old wrinkled hand reaches for me. I step in and reach for her fingers brushing the tips with mine. Sitting up slowly She pats the bed next to her moves an inc...

Right now I have three different residents in three different stages in the process of casting off the human shell that has housed their souls for over eight decades. One of them, Allie*, had been in fairly good shape until the night she had a massiv...

Anyone who works around the demented elderly population can attest to the fact that they sometimes say the darndest things. Mr. Rider is a pseudonym for the slightly plump octogenarian nursing home resident who had some cognitive decline due to vascu...

Long-term care nursing is a specialty that involves helping patients who need extended care as they deal with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Long-term care nurses coordinate the care of patients, perform nursing skills, respond to changes in con...

This past month has been literally four and a half solid WEEKS of that kind of shift, leading me to formulate yet another list of thoughts that we nurses harbor, but would never utter........at least, not unless we find standing in an unemployment li...

I believe rules can be bent at times. Heck, I feel that some rules can even be outright broken as long as doing so has brightened someone's day. Billie is a pseudonym for the septuagenarian nursing home resident whom I first met seven years ago when ...

Ida came to us from an understaffed and unsafe local nursing home. She had type II diabetes and as a result, had necrotic toes on her feet. Infections were common in her feet, and they tried relentlessly to treat in the nursing home. But one of the s...

Mary and John are great friends. Mary is 94, John is 96. John still has much of his mind, whereas Mary has dementia that's been progressing a lot lately. They met when John moved to the nursing home about 2 years ago. They do everything together. Eve...

Here I am moseying down the hall taking care of business. VS before dig, crush so and so's meds, not the Dilantin capsule though, put it in a bit of applesauce. Flush the peg. "Med pass for you." "Open wide, here you go." "Now swallow." "Big drink." ...

It never fails....you're walking down the hall to check on your new patient when you hear an aide loudly attempting to persuade sweet, confused, deaf-as-a-post Ethel to get into bed "BECAUSE IT'S NIGHTTIME AND EVERYONE IS GOING TO SLEEP!" Ethel, for ...

Therapeutic lying is the practice of telling little 'white lies' or fibs to prevent from agitating the patient with dementia. Even though some of us were taught to never lie to any patient under any circumstances due to ethical issues, please realize...

Although I no longer work in the long term care industry, I am still acquainted with people who work in local LTC facilities. My close friend, a nurse manager at a local nursing home, griped to me about a recent state survey that involved two assista...

Some mornings I stand at my picture window, steaming coffee mug in hand, and look out through the bare trees in my back woods, which in warmer seasons are lush with green leaves that shade the property and allow me to feel magnificently isolated here...

I am a seasoned long-term care nurse. I deal with life and death matters all the time. My voice is often the last one a patient hears, and my hand the last human touch he or she feels. It's OK most of the time, that's why I was built strong enough to...