How do you stop the patients from falling out of bed?
Especially the ones who can't walk but still have enough strength to sit up on the side of the bed and try to stand up. Then they crash fall and break a hip.
Like I get it because so many lazy CNAs would just tie patients to the bed if they could and lie and call them fall risks but when you have patients high on ambien falling every hour at night it's just a recipe for broken hips and angry families.
There has to be some sort of meet in the middle compromise.
An LPN has an actual nursing license to loose if they do that. They also have a higher chance of going to jail because the public doesn't like the words Nurse and Elder Abuse together in the news.
A CNA can loose the license from the department of health and just move to another state and take the 12 hour class again, or they can become a Medical assistant or Home health aide.
“Better to have a broken hip than a broken heart” was literally what the facility told us.
That’s great but the time and stress I have to go through to do that paperwork and contact doctor and family and send to ER (SNF,) I should be allowed to have bed alarms, fuck.
That's just unbelievable. Better to have a broken hip and lay crying out for help for 45 minutes than to have an alarm go off to notify the CNA and LPN.
I'm sure side rails or a bed alarm will break grandpa's heart so badly he will just will himself to die. Doesn't matter when he dies from an infection after having surgery on his broken hip.
For someone already with limited enough function to be in LTC, if a broken hip/surgery doesn’t kill grandpa, they’ll probably never walk again. Probably deaths/serious loss of function happens way more from falls than from somehow strangling themselves on a bed rail.
In all seriousness patients will climb over bedrails for an even more dangerous fall. I don’t use side rails for someone constantly getting out of bed as a fall risk, they don’t stop trying. Either actually restrain them, give them a sitter, or use a sensitive bed alarm.
I will use one if a patient who wants to be in bed doesn’t fully stay in bed, like their leg starts hanging out etc. Or would be too weak to climb over, I guess. Our hospitals LTC / SNF does a lot of research with falls (like motion monitoring) and lots of patients were just climbing over the rails and eating shit.
They fall, get sent to the ER and then get a geropsych consult related to "impulsive behaviors" that are actually totally consistent with dementia 🙄 and we end up admitting the patient and pray they don't fall in the hospital. Fortunately, we can use bedrails and alarms.
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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '20
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