What to do when patient refuses wearing a name band?

[pinkdoves]

Sorry for posting so much I just have a lot on my mind. This is a question I think of a lot and no ones seems to know the answer to. I work with children, and there are some (whether bc of psych issues, autism, etc) children who refuse to wear the bracelet. Some of them even rip it up. So what we do is leave the patient name band by the computer. Obviously regulations and the law require all patients to wear this. But what are we supposed to do when they refuse? When inspectors come by and yell that so and so is not wearing a patient name band??

[JKL33]

On 7/13/2021 at 6:39 PM, pinkdoves said:

Obviously regulations and the law require all patients to wear this.

A little off-topic but I don't think this is true. Patients being identified using two identifiers is a NPSG (national patient safety goal) but always good to understand when an employer's way of doing something is or isn't "the law." Wearing the identification may be the most common and arguably most reasonable way of facilitating the checking of 2 identifiers in a variety of situations, but it is not the law as far as I can tell. Someone chime in if I'm wrong about that.

Here's a bit that TJC has to say about it

^ I only bothered commenting about this because if you understand that something is not the law but rather the employer's policy, it becomes easier to ask them how best to accommodate the situation according to their policy (and what to do if their policy doesn't seem to address a particular situation).

[Ioreth, BSN, RN]

In my hospital unit, we have an advanced dementia patient who is periodically violent and is sadly fairly young and very strong. Due  to her unique situation, she has been here for a long time and will continue to be here for a long time. We cannot put a bracelet on her and we certainly cannot approach her with a scanner. We have had to put her bracelet label on a card and leave it in the hands of the sitter who will hand it to us when scanning meds, but we used to leave it at the in-room computer. We expect state inspections very soon, so we are tightening up our practice. This is the only compromise we have found between staff safety and HIPAA.

[Emergent, RN]

Typical of the State to worry about the fact that a bar coded bracelet is not on a patient that everybody knows very well and there is no doubt who the patient is. Yet the state is still looking to maybe ding the facility for a technical violation of a blanket policy that cannot apply to everyone, because people are individual human beings.

That's because the state has not one ounce of common sense or critical thinking. They are two-dimensional rule enforcers that have no grasp on the fact that nursing and healthcare is very dynamic and ever-changing. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is staff shortages, high ratios, and infrastructure that is often dysfunctional on many levels.