I work in a LTC facility and am a fairly new LPN. I'm very much a type A personality who strongly believes in being a patient advocate. I believe that residents deserve water, food, cleanliness, oral care, clean rooms, time, touch, and most of all compassion. I thoroughly enjoy my job, but I hate the fact that my unit only works with 2 cna's. We have 10 hoyer residents, atleast 20 totals, 3 tubefeeders, 8 diabetices, 2 foleys, 1 suprapubic, 1 resident who gets dialysis 3 times a week, etc. There is a total of 28 residents, but what I consider to have somewhat high acuity. I talked to the ADON and the clinical coordinator and told them that my unit needs atleast 3 CNA's and they told me that the overall census wasn't high enough, we need 150 residents and we have 147. The care is less than adequate due to not enough CNA's. I spoke with the Administrator and she told me that I enable my CNA's by helping with care, doing my own vitals, and passing water to the residents. No I really don't have time, but neither do the CNA's. The med pass is very large and the morning one takes atleast 3 hours to do. Like I said I'm a fairly new grad and hope that me attempting to be a patient advocate is something that will last and not something that will go to the wayside as time goes on and I keep running into walls. But back to title, I was told you eventually get a little numb and quit fighting city hall for better care, because it gets you nowhere, but the unemployment line. What are we as Americans doing to our LTC people? We treat people in jail better than some of our geriatric population. Like I've said before, "God bless the LTC population", because somehow we as a nation have neglected to take care of our parents, grandparents, etc. I know not all places are bad and not all nurses get numb, but time does take a toll of some of these nurses who started out just as fiesty as me. Sorry so long.
