Nursing is definitely a customer service based
profession. Nurses deal with people
which can make it very frustrating, because people can be very difficult to
handle at times.
In my experience as a nurse, one of the many areas of
healthcare that needs vast improvement is communication skills. This is an important skill that all
healthcare professionals should possess, however many times patients/family
members are left wondering if there are any communication skills present in the
healthcare profession.
As part of my job as resource RN, it is my responsibility to
handle any customer service issues that may arise on my shift. I’m going to be honest and say that I HATE
this part of the job and would much rather be able to hand it off to someone
else. Unfortunately that is not an
option.
A few nights ago, I was called to one of the wings by a
nurse who was having a problem with a patient’s wife, daughter and son. When I arrived, the nurse informed me the
family was upset because they were under the assumption that the patient was
going to have surgery that evening and it was getting late and they were
curious as to why he had not left for the OR.
As the nurse continued explaining the situation it became clear, the plan
of care did not include surgery of any sort, rather the patient was going to be
discharged as soon as possible and evaluated at the outpatient clinic.
As the nurse was explaining this to me, we heard yelling and
screaming coming from down the hall. As
we went to investigate we found this particular patient’s family carrying on
about the plan of care. They were irate
and yelling at everyone who crossed their path.
Now there are many problems with this situation. First this patient was in a semi-private
room, meaning there was another patient being exposed to the angry tyrant. Second it was the middle of the night and the
rest of the patients were trying to sleep, trying being the key word at this
point. And thirdly, the patient in
question was lying in bed with a stressed out look on his face. He was trying to calm his family down with no
success. As the family continued
yelling, the patient began to look sicker and sicker. Upon checking his vital signs, it was
discovered his blood pressure was 210/267, which is extremely high. At this point, this had become a patient
safety issue and the situation needed to be handled.
We tried to talk with the family members, but there was no
calming them down. We paged doctors on
call and they came up to discuss the plan of care with the family. This just resulted in the daughter storming
out of the patient room, and entering the waiting room, where she began to
throw around the coffee cups and coffee packets. At this point, I realized there was really
nothing I could do to diffuse the situation and had only one option. So I paged security and asked them to escort
the family out of the hospital.
Security arrived and told the family to take it
outside. This resulted in one last loud
and abusive tantrum before security removed them. As soon as the family left the floor, a sense
of quiet entered the wing once again.
The patient distressed rather quickly and his blood pressure returned to
normal. He was able to get some rest and
by the time his family returned a few hours later, they had calmed down and was
able to talk about the plan of care with clear heads. As it turned out the problem resulted from one team of doctors telling the patient/family they were going to do surgery before discussing their decision with his primary team who had decided surgery was out of the question. If there had been just a little bit of communication between these members of the healthcare team, this situation could have been averted and my night would have been a lot quieter.
