Sunday, August 31, 2008
I was faced with a situation on my cardio respiratory placement which quite upset me. I have a patient who is a barietric patient (over 120kg) and had recently had a lap band removed. During the procedure the splenic vessel was nicked (open laparotomy) and the patient lost a lot of blood. Her haemoglobin level had dropped down to 88 and as a result of this the patient had not been out of bed as she was in tremendous pain and extremely light headed. Despite all of this my patient was very eager and somewhat anxious to get out of hospital so she was very compliant with her physio, always willing to ambulate and progress the distance she had walked in the previous session. By the end of the week chest physio was no longer indicated and discharge seemed to be the likely option once all of her attachments had been removed. This one particular day i went to see this patient she voiced to me that today she was unable to do physio as there was not a gown big enough for her. I had noticed the nurses had dressed my patient in one of the smaller gowns that barely covered her. I decided that that was not the case and went searching through linen cupboards, called the ward care assistant, and even called the large linen storage room to locate a larger gown. After 1 hour i still had no luck. I spoke to my supervisor about the matter and she was quite angry. She told me that it was the wards responsibility to have 3 barietric gowns in the linen cupboard and that if my patient was unable to receive physio as a result of this, it would require her to fill out an incident form. It wasnt until 15 mins prior to finishing 2 hours later from my inital request for linen did a gown get brought up to the ward so i quickly fit in as much treatment as i could and explained to my patient the reason for the delay. The patient seemed almost embarrassed that i had searched far and wide for a larger gown for her but was grateful for my efforts. Upon reflecting i thought that it was absolutely not acceptamble that a patient would miss out on physiotherapy which was essential for them due to the hospital being unable to accommodate for them. Has anyone been in a similar situation? What was your reaction and how did you manage the situation?
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2 comments:
hey,
yeah i've had a couple of things like that happen. one time i wanted to walk a patient who needed ambulatory oxygen, but the oxygen tank needed changing and there was no one on the ward who was qualified to do it. another time it was a similar situation except that there was enough oxygen- only there was no plastic trolley to wheel the oxygen in. it's unfortunate that physios arent treated like surgeons, in that we cant just hold out our hand and say "scalpel" and one magically appears. guess it's one of the humbling things of this profession- that we often end up running around the hospital chasing something thats probably worth only a couple of dollars.
peace out amego
Hey,
A similar thing has happened to me on prac this week. One of my pt's has a drain in place which is attached to suction on the wall. The tubing between his drain and the suction is only a few metres long so he can't ambulate very far and can't even go to the shower or toilet which he finds very upsetting. I spent over an hour on friday trying to chase up a longer tubing for the drain. I eventually found out that another ward on the hospital had longer tubing but then there was large formalities to go through in order to borrow the item from another ward. The patient and I felt it was really important to get the extra tubing so he could ambulate but noone else seemed to care. So frustrating!
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