Who to "complain" to?

[mommy2boys]

My mom had neck surgery on monday and had a issue w/ one nurse. She was having terrible pain post op and the nurse was ignoring her, acting very rude, and actually hurting her while doing assesments. She called the nurses station and her nurse said that she would be right there w/ her pain meds. IT took the nurse almost an hour to get the meds to her. This happened for 8 hours straight (we think that it was her shift). The rest of her stay was wonderful and the nurses were right on top of her pain. (SHe says that they were almost to on top of it).

The hospital is know for having the best nursing care in the area (both word of mouth and advertised). And they brag about having very low nurse to patient ratios. My mom said that all the other nurses were wonderful except this one. So who should she talk to. She is going to tell the doctor about her, but who should she notify in the hospital. Or is it just a waste of time to say anything?

Thanks for any advice!:nuke:

Erin

[allele, LPN]

First of all, I hope your Mom is doing okay and I'm sorry she had a nurse like that. It's great that she had mostly wonderful nurses but she spent unnecessary time in pain because of that one nurse and that's terrible. I think would start by contacting the director of the unit. If she doesn't seem receptive then you can move further up to administration, but my guess is that if the hospital is known for great nursing care the director is going to take your concerns seriously. I do NOT think it's a waste of time at all! The director will hopefully talk to the nurse and see what happened and see to it that it doesn't happen again. Good luck and I hope your mother is doing well!! :)

[MA Nurse]

I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with that nurse. My dad died this last Sept. and he was treated badly at the last hospital he was in. I contacted the patient liason and filed a complaint. Basically, I don't think it did much good. We received 2 letters that were very formal, typed and very impersonal about the action they supposedly took. From my experience, it is very hard to get a nurse fired or in much trouble.

You could start out with the charge nurse, then go to the liason if they have one and tell her the nurse's name. OR you could try to talk to the nurse yourself. I've done that in the past with a lot of probelms we had with poor care.

Good luck:nuke:

[Tweety, BSN, RN]

Best wishes to mom.

I would make a phone call to the nurse manager, unless there is a liason like mentioned above.

This nurse definately needs to be reported.

[Luv2BAnurse]

As the rest stated, hope your mom is doing well now. Was the person that answered the call light your mom's nurse? If not, she may not have known about the pain sooner. What happened for 8 hours straight? Did your mother call out every hour for something for pain? I'm just trying to understand what the nurse did. Sometimes it does hurt to be assessed after surgery, unless you "forego" turning someone to check skin and posterior lung sounds and such.

I see things like this happen where I work, and sometimes the nurse just can't seem to get "caught up", so in report they let the oncoming shift know that so and so in room such and such had pain all shift which lets the next shift get and stay on top of things better.

Of course, I wasn't there, but I thought I'd throw that in to chew on.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

At this stage of the game about the only thing you and your mom can do is write a letter to the DON or the administrator. Your mother will receive a survey in the mail soon as well that will ask her to evaluate her hospital stay and she will probably have an opportunity to write her concerns on that as well.

In the future, anyone who is a patient in pain and is having to wait an hour for their pain medication (or, for their light to be answered as happened when I was a patient) should simply pick up the phone, press the "0" and ask the hospital operator to page the nursing supervisor for them. That usually gets pretty quick results. When I was a nursing supervisor we responded very quickly to any patient paging us. In the case where I was a patient and my light as well as my roommates wasn't being answered. . .it turned out that the nurses on the unit had disabled the sound on the call light system and they had been tied up in other patients rooms, but the unit was set up in such a way that they were unable to actually see the lights that were lit up in the section of the unit where I and a number of other patients were. The nursing supervisor came into my room, explained why I was having to wait so long and apologized.