“Get In, Get Out As Quick As You Can”: Hospital Workers Are Not Sugarcoating Their Reality (51 Stories)

If you pass away, I’m packing you down to the morgue, wiping down the bed, calling housekeeping to clean your room and bringing in the next patient the same day.
There not a room or bed that someone hasn’t passed away in.

That a lot of white nurses are intimidated by black patients who allude assertiveness and know the rules , if they feel threatened by you they will put a behavioral red flag on your account., that will follow you wherever you go. White nurses and white doctors do not like people ( Black People) challenging them.

Towels that are used to clean up all sorts of body fluids or patients with all sorts of illnesses (bacterial, viral, bleeding, throwing up, etc) of both alive and dead patients are bleached/sanitized then brought back as clean towels for others to use.
That thought alone, made me take my own towels when hospitalized.

Oops just saw a mouse run across the ER floor.

There are so many things I could put, many of them not appropriate. But something that always bothers me are the amount of unnecessary “serial” labs and X-rays that are done on a daily basis (sometimes multiple times a day) and the price of all of them. SD RN x 10 years ICU RN x 5 years

Also we notice when your alarm coincides with your PRN pain relief being due.

"Sorry sir, we don't carry salt up here. No, no matter how much you raise your voice at me, how hard of a tantrum you throw, it won't make some magically appear, and I'm not about to call nutritional services to bring you up just a single packet of salt. Why don't we have salt? Because a lot of patients that are on a salt-restricted diet also have the ability to walk, and if we kept it out in the open, they'd just take it, and we're in the business of helping our patients get better, not worse. Now, if you're not salt-restricted, I can show you how to order your own food, and I would suggest that you add a seasoning kit to each order, so even if you end up *not* using salt on that specific meal, you'll have some for later in case you forget to order. Make sense? I'll see you in a bit, I'm in the middle of changing a patient's sheets, and I had to stop for 5 minutes to tell you why I don't have salt in a way that'll prevent you from arguing with a nurse."


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Side note #1 - As far as ratios are concerned, one of the things that I love about my unit, is that it feels like between management keeping tabs on staffing, and the physical size of our specific unit, they don't have the ability to have dangerous ratios for the nurses. We have a maximum of 20 patients spread across 12 rooms. The closest I've seen us to full capacity would be 18 patients spread across 4 nurses, with a 5th coming in later in the shift. 2 of our patients are essentially residents and have been with us for months. I do know that *if* a nurse gets assigned 5 patients, it's one of those 2. Otherwise, the most I've seen is 4 patients to a nurse. Now, there have been shifts where I'm the only CNA on the floor. Whether that's because we have a surprise need for 1:1 sitters and that leaves only 1 tech on the floor, but about 2/3 of the way through a shift, the house supervisor goes to every unit and see what their staffing needs are, to make sure that if the next shift needs an additional nurse or tech, they call someone in from the float pool or offer overtime. The house soup is usually pretty good at talking to each of the techs to make sure we're not overwhelmed as well, in case the charge nurse of the unit is too busy to keep tabs on us, and they're pretty good at getting us reinforcements if we need it.

Side note #2 - The only thing I like about our charting software is that once you get in to write a note, you literally can't do anything else. Either you're finishing the note, or you're abandoning it and typing from scratch later. Understanding this, I don't have an issue when a nurse redirects a patient to me. "Blind, can you get 22 a pitcher of water?" or "Blind, can you get 27 bed 1 a heated blanket please?" Sure, all day, every day. I also take the time to (re)educate the patient and/or family on how to use the call light, because 4 times out of 5 it's faster than someone getting up and approaching the nurses station.

The pillows aren’t replaced between patients. They’re wiped down with bleach wipes and a pillow case it put on

We use the blankets in the OR to wipe up blood, pee, fluids on the dirty floor. And I gladly still cuddle up with the blankets knowing this.
Also we never have any of the supplies/ instruments we need to do surgery. There’s a lot of creative leeway because of that.

Many times the morgue shares the back half of the walkin freezer with the kitchen (separated by a wall).

Bed bugs are a SERIOUS problem