Being allowed to visit your comatose father is arguably for YOUR benefit more than his. That might be what they were thinking, that *you *needed to be able to see/say goodbye/whatever.
Very well put. Thank you!
True. Which is why I do state that it’s policy, and *then *state why that policy was put into place. Especially if I can find a policy that relates to patient safety, it goes over pretty well and makes people feel like their actions (or inaction, in this case) really matter to their loved one as much as mine do. Maybe it’s just me, but I have that way of subtly playing the “we’re all in this together” card along with the “you don’t want grandma to get an infection, riiiiiight?” guilt card without actually saying it. 
But you’re absolutely right that it won’t forestall all argument. In my experience it forestalls more arguments than a simple appeal to authority does. If you ever find anything that forestalls ALL arguments, please do PM me!
I just asked about the No Visitors under 14 policy this morning and was told that it is now a state law in CA, though not all hospitals enforce it. It’s the germ factor, mainly–kids give more germs and also need to be protected from them more.
Docs, nurses, and security will make exceptions if someone is dying and they really want to see the young ones, etc.
Okay, it’s in other states too, with the age going up to 16 or 18:
I’m OK with that as a general policy as long as they are willing to make exceptions where it’s sensible, such as with the dying. Or perhaps when the patient is a young child hospitalized for a period of time a visit from a sibling might be of benefit to both. Or allowing a 16 year old mother to visit her ill baby (yes, I realize there are issues with 16 year old mothers besides visiting hours, but these things happen). Or probably a dozen other circumstances, but those would be exceptions.
Jesus, are they still enforcing that ban? It’s from 3 years ago, and everyone here gave it up 2 years ago, because there was no reduction in infection after they banned kids.
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When you take their papers for Admitting, maybe you could forestall being interrogated by telling them, “It’ll be 10 (or however many) minutes at a minimum before these are processed. Please have a seat and you’ll be called when they’re ready for you.”
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That just guarantees that they’ll be bugging you at ten minutes and five seconds. The clever ones get a feel for how fast things usually go, then pad that by five minutes, so when they say something will take about 20 minutes and it’s done in 15, they’re thrilled.
That’s not what hospitals are for. Hospitals are for diagnosing your medical problem, treating your medical problem, and mostly, keeping a close eye on you while your body is in a possibly unstable state. Doing so often requires lab draws at five am, vitals signs in the middle of the night, 'round the clock nursing care, and absolutely zero to do with sleep. Rest and recovery happens afterwards, at home/rehab/LTC.
Oh God, I feel a rant coming on.
If I made the rules for the hospital:
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If you call me into your room to tell me you’re bored, I might have to slug you. Yes, the hospital is boring. Our TVs are small and of shit quality. Bring a book. Bring a computer or an iPod. If you brought nothing, tough it. I’m a nurse, not Patch Adams, and I’ve got people with actual problems to look after.
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Yes, I’ll get you a juice cup. But you might have to wait. Please refrain from the eye rolling, sarcastic, “thanks, I guess” when I come back forty minutes later. A woman was projectile vomiting down the hall. Would you like to switch places with her, because I went directly to see her.
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No, you can’t have your medications at the exact time you take them at home. I’ve six people to manage, and some of them take 20 medications in the morning alone (yes, one person, 20 pills. My record is a man who took 31 in one go). You will not die if you have to wait until 9:00am to take the pill you usually take at 7:00 am.
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If you tell me you have a migraine, pain level of 10, and want your 2mg of IV dilauded every 3 hours as allowed, I will give it to you. If you ask me for it while laughing with your friend, watching TV loudly, and every light blazing, I will still give it to you, but I’ll hate you a little for wasting my time so you can get high. Just so you know.
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Yes, the doctor changed your medications. Yes, even that one your other doctor told you to take every day. It wasn’t working for you. That’s how you ended up here. No, I won’t give it to you anyway. No you may NOT take one from your home stash.
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No, I will not page the doctor to ask when he or she will be here. They don’t know when they’ll be here. Furthermore, I don’t know for certain when your MRI is, or what time X ray will call for you. This isn’t a restaurant, in case the food quality didn’t tip you off. We don’t have reservations. If someone else has a medical emergency, they get to cut in line.
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No, you can’t eat that food before your procedure. Yes, you might have to go 18 hours without food. No, you wont die. We can take a field trip down the hall to visit a man with an intestinal blockage and an NG tube who hasn’t had food (by mouth, tube, or IV) for four days. I like him, he complains less than you.
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Consider not calling your nurse an idiot. She’s been given a license to stick you with needles.
breathes I feel better now.
Small Hen, I feel for you. My mother spent a lot of time in hospitals, and I was raised with an almost worshipful respect for nurses. Overworked and underappreciated. My mother always sent a huge fruit basket to the station after she left.
I’m married to a psych nurse. The latest WTF moment was when the mother of one of his patients went off on him as he brought her son to the visitation room. The reason? “Those are my son’t shoes!! I brought him those shoes!! You stole my son’s shoes!!” Husband had to go to the patient’s room and get the damned shoes - still in the box - to show her. Then there was the woman who brought a can of snuff to her son in the no-tobacco-products-allowed hospital. He was generous about sharing it, so there were puking patients all over the ward.
Thank you! Patients who look into my eyes and say, “Thank you for your help” are the reason that I love my job, despite the tone of my last post.
Oh God, the smokers. I actually have a lot of sympathy for a smoker in the hospital, but really, there’s nothing I can do about it, besides get you a nicotine patch (anyone who asks if they can go downstairs and smoke gets a ‘no’, along with an offer for a patch. I’ve had exactly one taker). ‘No smoking’ is probably the number 2 reason people leave the hospital unstable (number 1 is ‘not insured’, number 3 is ‘want a drink’.)
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in hospitals, and I completely agree that nurses are awesome and under appreciated.
Yay, nurses!
Why does that have to be mutually exclusive with getting some rest?
And to set the record straight - I’m not talking about the stuff you mentioned. Of course those things have to happen. But do the following true stories also have to happen?
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Admitting a patient in the same room at 4am (this involved 2 different nurses, lots of questions, lights on, portable computers beeping, etc)
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Patient rooms that open directly into the nursing station where the nurses are busy working all night (couldn’t the floor be designed so the gap between patient doors is where the nursing station is located?)
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All the various sounds that carry from room to room. If a hotel can be made so a TV in one room isn’t heard in the next, why can’t they make hospital rooms like that?
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Moving patients from one room to another 2 or 3 times a week. That doesn’t seem like a lot to a healthy person, but when you’re seriously ill, it’s a big deal. And I’m not talking “we need to move her to floor X because her treatment requires equipment/staff on floor X are required”, I’m talking “We’re moving her to Floor X because the hospital is trying to save money by shutting down Floor Y 3 days a week.”
None of these things have to do with nursing care (which was always excellent). The nurses/doctors didn’t like this any more than we did - it was all stuff that should/could have been addressed by the hospital admin. And obviously a lot of it requires money, which a lot of hospitals have problems with. But some - like the patient admit at 4am - I gotta ask “really? There’s no other place in this HUGE hospital to admit a patient other than a room with another patient at 4am? Absolutely NOWHERE?!?”
Athena, you want sounds to carry. When my father-in-law was in the hospital for pneumonia and started having a hallucinatory episode where he started physically fighting us and trying to get out of bed and escape, we regretted being way way down the hall away from the nurses’ station. In the ensuing chaos, we couldn’t find the call button and I had to run down the hall for help. I can think of a lot of other situations where you’d want to also be able to hear what’s going on.
Fair enough.
Hospitals will soon have to face losing some reimbursement if their HCAHPS scores (from the patient surveys where they rate things from 1 to 5) aren’t consistently high enough, as we were just told yesterday.
We’re all in favor of improving hospital conditions, but it’s going to be tougher to do that with reduced staffing and remaining staff spread thin. Our own volunteer supervisor, who also handles patient complaints, now has to work at an additional hospital, so she won’t be around as much. Her counterpart at that one was laid off with one week’s notice after 30+ years.
The biggest source of complaints is the ER. I wonder if it’s that way at all hospitals.
Because that’s when the other patient got sick, came in, was admitted and brought to the floor. It’s unfortunate, but I can’t imagine the chaos that would happen if the ER wasn’t allowed to admit patients between 10pm and 6am. And it’s very possible that your double room had the only available bed.
Ferret Herder covered this one.
Poor/cheap designing on the part of those responsible for building. Not much I can do about it, sadly.
[quote]
- Moving patients from one room to another 2 or 3 times a week. That doesn’t seem like a lot to a healthy person, but when you’re seriously ill, it’s a big deal. And I’m not talking “we need to move her to floor X because her treatment requires equipment/staff on floor X are required”, I’m talking “We’re moving her to Floor X because the hospital is trying to save money by shutting down Floor Y 3 days a week.”
[quote]
I hate that too, and I know it’s disruptive. I also know it’s dictated by a bunch of people who never come to the floor and see patients, and who are only interested in money. See the next bit of my reply for further details.
Abso-fucking-lutely. There is NOWHERE. I cannot EXPRESS to you the amount of strain I am under to get patients in and out quickly because a Tele bed is required, and none are available. Sometimes I am told to move a patient to another room just to make way for a patient of a particular gender (for example, moving a man into an empty bed with another man so a woman can come to the floor). I’ve cried maybe 3 or 4 times since becoming a nurse two years ago. Once was because a patient died. The other times were from the stress placed on me to move patients in and out of the hospital as quickly as I can whilst other patients are making demands of me (and rightly so, taking care of them is my job). Patients in/patients out = money for the hospital, and THAT is the bottom line of my workplace. We are expected to fill those beds.
Yes, that’s what I meant – I don’t know how much benefit it was to my sister and me to see dad lying there in a coma, swathed in bandages, hooked up to whatever equipment would have been in use then. I don’t remember the event at all, but I will have to ask my sister sometime. I would think it would be more scary and nightmare-inducing than anything else.
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing. Of course people get sick and need to be admitted at all hours of the day.
What I’m specifically talking about is the 20-30 minutes of questioning and filling out forms and checking stuff on the computer that goes on as part of being admitted. When my family member was admitted, that was done in the ER before she got to her room. I guess what I’m wondering is why, given that we’re in a gazillion square foot hospital and at 4am this person obviously came into the ER first, they had to do the form-filling-out in a room with another sleeping patient in it.
I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a nurse in a hospital. Well, yes I can, because I’ve got several friends and family members who are and they tell me all kinds of stories. The strain you’re under, the importance of what you’re doing, and the insane things they ask you to do make me wonder why anyone does the job. And to be very clear - I never had ANY problems with the nurses in the hospital. They were all great. But the whole admin side of things was miserable.