TALES FROM THE NURSING HOME

Tonight will be another night that I don't get a bath because they are short staffed. Even though most residents are asleep at this hour, the CNA's don't take the time to give those who are awake a bed bath like they are supposed to. Then the day shift comes in and has to do more work because they have to get residents up and taken to the dinning room and give baths to those that didn't get one, bring back those in the dinning room, make beds, and straighten rooms. All because night shift doesn't want to do their job. Here, the night shift sits in the dayroom watching tv and gossiping. We've got three good CNA's, two at night and one during the day. The others make you wonder how they became Certified in the first place. They don't know how to make a bed with someone in it, how to take a blood pressure, how to open a bedside drain bag to empty it. I'm glad I'm one of the few that know whats going on and can speak up for myself.

We even have one nurse that is going blind and they put her on wound care. She came to change the dressing on my wounds and had to ask me, when she was finished, if there were any dressings left on the table. The table is brown and the dressings are white. It should have been obvious that there were none left on the table. But that's the was it goes around here.