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Have you had a conversation to address concerns about your spouse’s care? There is always some flexibility around the care that she’d be receiving, and one core
by xattt 7y ago
Have you had a conversation to address concerns about your spouse’s care? There is always some flexibility around the care that she’d be receiving, and one core component to that is your rational/measured input, either in person or by phone. Framing your concern as rational helps immensely in establishing a dialogue with care staff. It sounds like your core problem is that you want to be bothered less.
Nurses are not there to make every patient's stay miserable. At least in my practice setting, we are extraordinarily receptive to suggestions around care and stepping in as informal advocates when families are not available.
- lojack 7y agoWe ran into this with my daughter who needed multiple surgeries. Two different experiences in two different hospitals. First hospital was world renowned, ranked #1 in the world for the category of care she needed. This hospital seemed to spend all their money on what I would call “celebrity surgeons”. World renowned, only the best. I suspect the side effect is that they spent much less money on nursing care. There was only one or two nurses to a single floor overnight, and they utilized nursing assistants for everything. I got lots of attitude from the nurses, I suspect it was part of the culture. Their schedules were also much more rigid since they had a lot more patients to cover with limited resources. They also seemed to focus a lot more on the raw numbers and not the individuals. We fought tooth and nail to get a schedule that worked, and got a small amount of wiggle room, but it took a lot of work. Second hospital was a completely different experience. They had a good surgeon, who had good outcomes, but didn’t have as many surgeries under his belt, so less data. I suspect this meant he took up less of the budget. This hospital had zero nursing assistants, and each nurse only had one or two patients at any given time. This resulted in the nurses advocating for us, and actually working their schedule around us.
- eitally 7y agoOur daughter was in for surgery at a world renowned hospital #1 for what she needed ... and our experience was like your second example. After she moved to the step-down unit from the ICU, she had the same day nurse for the next three days and the same night nurse for four, as well as a consistent overnight NP throughout. We had a private room with a separate vestibule containing a washing station & laundry bin for scrubs/aprons. Also in the room was a whiteboard where the current nurse always wrote the intended schedule and reviewed it with us at the start of their shift. Our room had a single-bed sized sofa and a fold-out chair. It was quiet, and except when we had to wake our daughter for overnight oral meds, the nurses let her sleep. To be honest, while it was a hugely stressful situation, I'm convinced the hospital recovery environment and staff played an enormous role in our daughter being able to be discharged only 4 days after open heart surgery.
- lojack 7y agoThat sounds almost exactly like the hospital we were at (Rainbow Babies, for the record). Hope your daughter is doing good, my daughter is also a heart baby -- coarctation and bicuspid valve.
- jcims 7y agoThe nurses have been stellar and I’m sure would try to accomodate, but they would actually have to guard the room against all the other ramblers to gain a net benefit.
- xattt 7y agoAbsolutely. One strategy we’ve used is to literally put up “Do Not Disturb” signs when patients wanted rest.