Turn, Turn, Turn

While perusing my medical reading / updates a couple of days ago, I came upon an article / advertisement for a sticky pad thing we can attach to patients, to monitor how adherent we are to Q2 hour turning. The website is all touchy-feely-good time stuff regarding HAPU, and reduction of pneumonia and so forth. The kind of stuff that gets healthcare systems to invest another gazillion bucks on hardware, software, equipment and more beeping monitors (and ways to punish Nurses). All of those bazillion dollar expenditures (and branding bucks too), would be much better spent on real live Nurses and support personnel. Of course we who read this stuff, know all that! Phooey; just look at this website. ........http://www.leafhealthcare.com/

 Turn, Turn, Turn

Staff nurses will hate this
A patient-turning alert,
Electronic surveillance
The reprimands will hurt,
Because no one has time
To do Q2 hour turns,
We don't have enough staff
But nobody learns.

HPPD tallies
In case you don't know,
Rule every damn thing
Over at the big show,
It accounts patient care
With a static measure,
As if nurses were dallying
All those moments they treasure.

Another monitor thingy
That we stick to Billy Bob,
He’s as hairy as a Yak
But don’t label him a slob,
He prides all of his fur
And dare not, you trim,
His hair is religious
According to him.

If I place that sensor
On his naked back,
Will the monitor think
It's a face-down hack,
And I will be reported
To the motionless committee?
Could I be fired? (Then I'll sue)
Oh, isn't that a pity.

Q2 turning is great
With caregivers aplenty,
But that concept was banned
Way back in 1920,
While working the most recent
Fifteen year gap,
Any bedside Nurse can tell you
It's been a spank and a slap.
_ _ _ _ _ _

My favorite contributor of hospital nonsense.........in Virginia, has this to say:

We have these thing called VisAlerts.  They hang on the outside of each room.  They have a green, yellow and red light on them, connected to a timer.  When you go into the room, you reset it.  The light turns green.  At approx 54 minutes, it turns yellow.  At 1 hour (that's what ours are set to), they turn red.  If they manager or director see too many red lights, the  nurse gets a "talking to".
We didn't even have a working EKG machine on the 3rd floor last week.  We called a Rapid Response.  Our EKG machine had a broken clip.  We ran to get Ortho's EKG; theirs didn't work.  Renal didn't have one.  We had to go to the 2nd floor to find one.  (Renal didn't even have a bladder scanner.  Renal??)  And then they invest in these VisAlerts.  What a joke.