i am currently working on my neuro prac at a major hospital and am treating a stroke victim. I have been seeing this patient for about 2 weeks now and rehab seems to be going along nicely with the man now progressing into ambulation practice and retraining. Though the rehab is progressing I believe that his recovery had/has the potential to progress along at a much greater rate as the man is quite severely deaf and usually wears hearing aids which allows him to hear at an almost normal level.
Now when we found out that the man wore hearing aids it took about 3-4 days for someone to actually find them as they were right down the back of his bedside drawer!! However, even though we have them they are still useless as they are out of battery. The man reports that usually there is someone at his nursing home who can organise someones to come out and organise a replacement battery. However, since there is noone that does anything like this at this hospital then it is kind of a toss-up to see who is going to organise a replacement.
As this patient is medically stable then the main reason he is in hospital is for rehab (OT and PT) and so his lack of hearing is severely affecting the communication between us and the patient and it is effecting us the most and so we want to do something about it. However, my supervisor has told me that it should be the doctors or social workers duty to sort this out. Now I have spoken to both parties twice and they both say they are trying to organise something but it has now been close to a week and nothing seems to be happening.
So I'm kind of unsure as to what to do about this issue. I am kind of tempted to simply go to a shop that sells them and buy some my self as I believe allowing this man to hear would almost double the rate of recovery. However, the situation should be managed properly by the doctors or social workers and I am unsure about how to approach the issue with those parties as since I have already asked twice I dont want to seem pushy though I dont want to not do anything as this is not beneficial to the patient and this is also not very professional. So I will have a think over the weekend and try to come up with something for Monday but if anyone has any ideas/suggestions then please feel free to let me know.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Mmm this is a tricky one. Maybe discuss it with the head of nursing or the ward clerk/co-ordinator and see what their solution is and you could also ask if the hospital has a maintenance person on site that you could ring to come and replace the batteries asap, or that can organise to obtain them. If this fails you could discuss the issue with the patients family and get them to go to the nursing home to organise the batteries stressing their importance to the patient's treatment response. good luck :)
Post a Comment