Geriatric Nursing Rotation
For the next 3 weeks, my nursing class is doing a geriatric rotation at a nursing home. I managed to fumble through the first 2 clinicals without too much trouble (felt like a derp-head the whole time, though), but this next week looks scary!
Last week, we pretty much just had to care for one patient for our shift; get them up, cleaned, change their diaper, feed them breakfast, keep an eye on them, toilet them when they need it, feed them lunch, lay them down for their nap and then we leave. We get them up at 7 and breakfast is at 8, so I have 1 hour to get 1 patient out of bed (2 person lift for all patients required), bed bathed, diapered, dressed and off to the dining room. This week, we all have 2 patients to do this with, and still only one hour.
One of my patients gets a shower on Wednesdays (the day we do our AM clinicals), the other a bed bath. I have a hard enough time getting help to move my patients as it is, but this is gonna be crazy, because my teacher threw in another monkey wrench: 3 students this week have no patients assigned to them, they just have to give meds to all the patients on the floor. The other 4 students in this group have 2 patients. Just about all of these patients are not self mobile; who is supposed to help everyone with these two person lifts if everyone who is doing patient care has multiple patients to deal with? My teacher also said she "doesn't want us to rely so much on the aides at the nursing home"; who the hell else is supposed to help us when we each have multiple patients who need 2 person lifts?! Am I missing something here?
Last week, we pretty much just had to care for one patient for our shift; get them up, cleaned, change their diaper, feed them breakfast, keep an eye on them, toilet them when they need it, feed them lunch, lay them down for their nap and then we leave. We get them up at 7 and breakfast is at 8, so I have 1 hour to get 1 patient out of bed (2 person lift for all patients required), bed bathed, diapered, dressed and off to the dining room. This week, we all have 2 patients to do this with, and still only one hour.
One of my patients gets a shower on Wednesdays (the day we do our AM clinicals), the other a bed bath. I have a hard enough time getting help to move my patients as it is, but this is gonna be crazy, because my teacher threw in another monkey wrench: 3 students this week have no patients assigned to them, they just have to give meds to all the patients on the floor. The other 4 students in this group have 2 patients. Just about all of these patients are not self mobile; who is supposed to help everyone with these two person lifts if everyone who is doing patient care has multiple patients to deal with? My teacher also said she "doesn't want us to rely so much on the aides at the nursing home"; who the hell else is supposed to help us when we each have multiple patients who need 2 person lifts?! Am I missing something here?