I am currently working on a respiratory ward in a major hospital. Last week I was treating a patient and one of the things I was doing was taking them for a walk. Now the patient I was with was a private patient even though they were in a public hospital. From what I gathered it is given that if you are a private pt then they kind of get priority to the single rooms with the better views. This patient had been in 2 days and they had been in a nice single room which is whats expected.
So as I said I took this lady for a bit of a walk and we were gone probably 10 minutes and when we returned the nurses had begun moving her things from her single room into a 4 bedroom room. Now as the pt had a respiratory problem they were very short of breath on returning and so was trying to speak to the nurses about what was going on. During this period the pt was getting quite distressed as she was already short of breath from the walk and then was getting stressed out from the nurses moving her stuff and not being able to control the situation.
So I tried to reassure her that everything would get sorted out but in the mean time it was important she got control of her breathing as she was desaturating quite significantly but it didnt seem to bother her as she was more ocncerned with getting her room back.
Once she had regained control of her breathing and her saturation levels had returned to normal she begun to get quite agitated about the nurses simply moving her from room to rom without asking her. the patient begun to turn quite aggressive and turned into a mini-screaming match with the nurses. At this point I kind of started feeling a bit arkward as I didn't know whose side to support. I could see where the pt was coming from but I could also see where the nurses were coming from as they needed the room for a patient who needed to be confined.
So I chose to simply stand back and let the nurse resolve the situation with the patient. In the end the nurse kind of backed down and simply explained the siutation to the patient and in a way got on the side of the patient by saying they agree that its bad the way she was being treated and that she would do everything she could to get her a private room. So if anyone has been in the same sort of situatin could you please let me know what you did or if you have an opinion on how or what I could of done.
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1 comment:
Well that's a tricky situation! I think you handled it well - especially as students, I find when these political type situations come up that it's best to leave it to the people involved. The issue was between the nurse and the patient, and I think you did well to try and calm the patient down and get her more in control of her breathing. I've had a similar situation where two staff members were talking about a patient in quite a 'bitchy' way. They asked me for my opinion and I just said I didn't have one and left the room. hmm tricky!
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