E.
I have been in your position in numerous units I have been in. But in my current unit, it is totally different. There still are a few staff who are as you described, but the majority are super about listening to the patient and working with him to achieve what the patient knows he needs. They still do not have indepth dialysis knowledge, but they are very good at what they do know and totally professional about listening and respecting the patient’s wishes for care.
It makes such a big difference it is unreal. In fact, whereas I have been disliked in other units because I am assertive and because staff lacked confidence in themselves to know how to work with patients to meet the patients’ goals for care, in this unit I am treated with the utmost of respect.
How one is treated in dialysis is a measure of the professionalism of the staff. It is like day and night having a good staff like this. And not only that, but they are truly gentle and kind to patients. Some days I am so touched watching them in action as they care for one patient after another.
The interesting thing is, I haven’t figured out what makes them so different then the other staffs I have had. Has to be something, but hasn’t come to me yet :?:
This thread reminds me of a situation I had once time when I was in the hospital and had to dialyze at their unit.
I was in the hospital for quite a while, and all of the nurses (there were not any techs) knew me pretty well. I liked and respected all of the nurses I had regularly and had a really good relationship with them all.
One day when in went for tx, there a nurse I had never seen before. I found out later that she was from an agency because they were short staffed that day. Since I had never worked with her and was not familiar with her proficiency, I was double checking the settings of the machine to make sure they were the ones I used. I was asking her is she had done this and that and sometimes, she didn’t know how to change a particular setting. I knew because I had watched all of the other nurses change the settings.
So, of course, I would show her how to make my requested change that she did not know how to do. After my doing this a couple of times, she go extremely upset with me and we got into an actual argument (a very loud one, I might say) about how I shouldn’t touch anything and how I should just be quiet. And here’s the kicker - she told me that I was just a rude, annoying patient that none of the other nurses liked to work with.
I couldn’t believe what was happenning so I called for the charge nurse to come over. I did not want this particular nurse working with me anymore. The charge nurse had heard everything because we were so loud and very quickly, she made the nurse I was arguing with switch patients and one of the regular nurses came over to work with me.
The next day, the manager of the department came over to talk to me and she apologized profusely and said that she would not be hiring that temp again. She also made it clear to me that, in fact, all of the other nurses liked me a lot because I was very aware of what was going on with my tx and I would always help them solve a problem that popped up in my tx if I could.
Here is a post that sums up American dialysis well. Give a listen to what a long time staffer has to say:
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Posted 30 May 2006 08:29 AM
Acutally Chronic Hemodialysis hypotensive and hypovolemic episodes will always occur because WE are still dialyzing patients to a number vs a true dry weight.The Crit-Line Monitor plus proper dialysis training to include uf and sodium profile monitoring will take care of these problems .More training is the key…
Jane, by “hurt” do you mean going flat/passing out…etc?
I am a trained nurse, and although we do 3 years of study (with a bit of practical), we arent taught things like dialysis. So really, we are being thrown in the deep end too. Really the only way nurses can learn dialysis is to be thrown in there. But obviously you need to be shown what to do, and be supervised until you are confident. During our training we never did anything unsupervised unless we were 110% confident. We were actually supposed to be supervised at all times for things like medication rounds, dressings etc. But this was not always the case. I found alot of nurses were quite slack in supervising us. One nurse sent me off to give an IV med by myself. She failed to tell me what to do, it was supposed to be given as a bolus, but I had added it to the bag of saline. I had to ring my supervisor to come and help me, and check it before I administered it. Meanwhile the poor patient was very nauseas, but I couldnt give it to her until it was checked.