On my current neuro placement the majority of nurses have been very helpful and co-operative, however me and another student were having a lot of trouble with the nurses looking after one of our patients who requires a hoist transfer. As we usually have 45 minutes to 1 hour to treat the patients it is of most benefit for the patient to have them in their wheelchair and ready to go when we get there in order to receive the most treatment. Every morning we would speak to the nursing staff and make sure it suits them to have the patient sitting in the wheelchair at a certain time and every day the nurses would agree however the patient would never be ready. The first couple of times we didn’t mind too much because we understand that nurses can be very busy and unexpected things often pop up so we would hoist her into her chair. However, it kept happening and as the would often need to go to the toilet as soon as we sat her up and due to several other issues her treatment was being very compromised. It became very frustrating and I felt sorry for the patient as often we were only able to do 20 minutes of treatment and on some occasions she did not receive treatment.
We tried several strategies including speaking to the nurses a couple of times each day to ensure the patient will be ready, we wrote it on the whiteboard and in the diary the previous day but nothing worked. We ended up speaking to our supervisor about it and she sorted it out for us. Although ideally it would have been great to sort out this issue ourselves this made me realise that sometimes we do still need help from our supervisors or from other staff members. Now the patient is receiving 1 or 2 good length treatment sessions per day and is making good progress.
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3 comments:
I know what you mean. It can be extremely frustrating when you ask pretty simple things which are more in the interest of your patient than yourself and they never do it. We have a man on our ward with a traumatic head injury who also ruptured his ACL during the incident. The ortho team prescribed a richards splint that must be worn at all times when weight bearing. Unfortunately some nurses dont seem to read the patient notes and have walked the patient on several occasions with out his splint on! And due to the head injury the patient doesnt remember that he has to wear it. In the end we had to write all over his obs file that he must have the splint on so the nurses dont forget!
So did you find out what your supervisor did to sort it out for you? Might be helpful for us to know in any similar circumstances.
I dont think she did anything special but the nurses took her more seriously than they took us. I think it helped that she has been on the ward for many years therefore knows a lot of the nurses.
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