I just did something for the first time in my 35 years as a healthcare worker- I refused to accept a patient. When I got to work, the nurses in one zone were keeping a ratio of 4 to 1. My assignment was to take 3 patients from 3 different nurses, which together with the other nurses arriving at the same time as I would be lowering the zone to a 3 to 1 ratio.
Two of the nurses turned over their patients with no issues. The third nurse was Nurse Slacker, so I took a look at the chart. The patient had been placed in that room an hour and a half earlier, and nothing had been done. No vital signs had been taken, no IV started, no lab work ordered or drawn, and no assessment had been done. I went to the charge nurse and told him that I would not be accepting responsibility for that patient until the nurse actually did her job.
I will not be placing my name anywhere on that nurse’s chart and refuse to accept her patients unless they are properly cared for and it is properly documented. I am not risking my medical license for that incompetent, lazy slacker of a nurse. You can’t make me assume care for someone else’s patients when that person hasn’t done a single thing for them. The rest of the nurses in the zone won’t assist her because they aren’t willing to do her job for her, either.
When she finally came to me to give me report two hours later, she hadn’t even noticed that the charge nurse had done everything, treated the patient, and discharged her an hour earlier. That’s right, her patient had been gone for an hour and she never even noticed.
The charge nurse had no problem with it, and said that it would help if she wasn’t off the floor half the time. Management needs to do something, but they won’t.
EDITED TO ADD
For those who are asking: She is white. However, she is in a protected class, that of breastfeeding mothers. It’s due to a Federal law called the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act (PUMP Act). The law says that employees who are nursing have the right to reasonable break time and a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view to express breast milk while at work. Sure, it says reasonable, but that is subject to a court’s interpretation. What this means is exactly what the woman has told fellow employees- she can be in the pumping lounge as often and for as long as SHE thinks is reasonable. On of our charge nurses told me that they had a meeting about her, and they have been told that she is untouchable because she has already been to HR with her attorney in tow.
16 Comments
Boneman · January 31, 2025 at 5:34 am
Lyrics to an old Robert Johnson song come to mind… I will pose them in the form of a rhetorical question here….
“Tell me, milk cow, what on earth is wrong with you?”
I do hope in earnest that this issue is resolved BEFORE someone is seriously harmed… be it patient or attending healthcare worker(s).
I’m in your corner with this for sure. I mean seriously, I have NO issues having the back of a team mate… however, in a true TEAM there is an expectation of reciprocity and shared responsibility.
I don’t even sense an inkling of that here.
Keep us posted and do take good care.
Will · January 31, 2025 at 8:12 am
Let me guess. Bravo Foxtrot?
Steve S6 · January 31, 2025 at 8:13 am
Going to take a lawsuit to shake management loose. Sadly that means a patient suffers for it first.
Jerseygirl Angie · January 31, 2025 at 8:34 am
I assume Nurse Slacker belongs to a protected, litigious and extremely entitled, loud and vocal class .
oldvet50 · January 31, 2025 at 9:01 am
I am going to assume her race since she cannot be fired for incompetency. The saddest thing to me is all of that race is suspect because of just a few. It’s been that way for almost half a century now. Such a shame since there are plenty of that race that are excellent in their jobs, attitude and skills.
SiG · January 31, 2025 at 9:50 am
A personal annoyance of mine is the name of the law protecting her. The PUMP act? Seriously?
It’s the tendency for the moe-ron legislators to name a bill something catchy that generally has absolutely nothing to do with what the bill actually means, or is even the complete opposite of what the bill does.
It’s not just the Feds. The Florida RINOs just named a bill to get around Trump’s deportation of illegals the TRUMP act.
JG · January 31, 2025 at 10:21 am
I am a Retired Electrical Engineer and previous Manager. I had a similar problem after I hired an Engineer for my group that I quickly learned after a month was not up to his resume and the speed of my other Engineers. Since it was under the 90 day window I expected to be able to release him immediately but HR shot me down and it became a 6 month waste of time. HR forced me to give him special projects with timelines that he had to meet and when he did not they still would not let me fire him. I escalated to multiple levels of HR before I got permission to get rid of him. Me and my group left the company about two years later after the company was bought out by a European company that wanted everything in Europe.
Rick T · January 31, 2025 at 1:54 pm
We had a similar oxygen thief at Rocketydne back in the 80s. Al was hired as an MTS III (experienced engineer) but it was quickly clear he was not so he was going to be fired for failing 90 probation. On his 89th day he ‘fell backwards out of his chair and injured his back’ and filed a workman’s comp claim which gave him instant protection. He was stuffed in a corner and ignored because anything he was assigned to do took two competent people to fix after he was done. Two days before our regular Christmas shutdown he was recorded going to his car in the parking lot about an hour before he claimed to stop working on his timecard, and timekeeping fraud on a Federal project (Space Station) is a termination offense.
Al was fired the last day of work that year. And there was much rejoycing the creep was gone.
JimmyPx · January 31, 2025 at 10:26 am
I’ve seen this movie before although not with nurses.
Has management realized that they are looking at a much LARGER and more expensive lawsuit due to her incompetence and neglect of her patients ?
What if that patient that she had done nothing for was having a heart attack where time counts and they coded and died ? The family could then sue for negligence and WIN ALOT !
Your management I’m sure was told by HR that they CAN fire her but only after they have followed the process to a T. They need to document her failings and breaches of policies and procedures, have meetings with HR on this, put her on an improvement plan and THEN can fire her.
It’s a huge pain in the ass and no manager wants to deal with it, so they ignore it. Meanwhile the rest of the team gets more and more pissed off about it covering her work and eventually some (usually the best that you don’t want to lose) quit.
I’ve seen this many times in my career all because management won’t do their damn job.
SoCoRuss · January 31, 2025 at 12:11 pm
Ever notice how all the laws the commies put in have vague terms like reasonable, common sense , etc? At no time is a definition given on those terms. And yet they keep doing it with no repercussions.
I would think the hospital could go the not performing her duties and putting patients in danger route.
Me personally if I was her patient and received that level of non care, I would have lawyers lined up at the door of hospital management.
Dirty Dingus McGee · January 31, 2025 at 1:27 pm
In management, or as a small business owner, documentation is key. A little over 30 years ago I was plant engineer for a business that was unionized. The shop steward was a maintenance tech which put him in my department. We had to give him time, on the clock, to handle some union issues, which he milked to the max. Maintenance personnel were in charge of doing the set up’s on machinery when there was an order change to a different product.Part of that was to run the machine for a short time, 10-15 minutes, to ensure it was running properly. It was an issue for him, as it turned out that 4 out of 10(at least) order changes he did, needed follow up work before they would run correctly. After a second written warning he went ballistic and threatened to “whip somebody’s ass”. He was immediately fired and escorted off the property. Within 30 minutes I had a call from the unions business agent, which I immediately transferred to HR. Ended up in arbitration where the company prevailed, due to a 1 1/2 year record of sub par performance. The shitty part is, from start to finish, first conversation about work quality to final arbitration decision, the entire process took almost 2 1/2 years.
As a small business owner what I/we did was bring on folks thru a temp agency. Gave us time to get a feel for their work quality, punctuality and general attitude. We would do that for 90 days before any decision to hire them, also with a probationary period. Yes it cost us more to do it that way, but was far cheaper than some BS lawsuit.
Henry · January 31, 2025 at 1:29 pm
Over a 44 year career I saw my share of people promoted to fill quotas. First level managers are often stuck between a rock and a hard place – they are handed an unqualified employee and told to make it work and keep their mouths shut or HR will make their lives absolutely miserable. Departments with tough schedules to meet, a high performance team, and a manager who is working his ass off to keep the team funded and insulated from needless status reports and paperwork, can little tolerate getting stuck with an unqualified diversity hire (e.g. “it’s your turn to take one”). A popular technique that I saw for a time was called “pass the trash.” The manager who desperately wanted to offload an underperforming box checker would give him a sterling performance rating and then transfer him to another group that was short handed.
Ekrod · January 31, 2025 at 3:07 pm
BTDT.
Sometimes – only sometimes – the answer comes from the bottom up. Way back when in a different place far, far away and at a different time long, long ago, , I was part of an organization that suffered under the same issue. The company refused to do anything except “follow policy” which was structured to “afford maximum respect to the employee.”
In other words, everyone else got to shovel her shit. So we did. As a group we approached management with a solution: Assign the employee to a task which will not interere with the operation of the business – counting paperclips, inventoring the tree leaves on site, studying the output of fluorescent lights, counting the number of floor tiles in the hallways, cataloging the shade of off-white paint in the offices, whatever. The rest of us will divide up her responsibilities and take care of all of them, we will partition out her job and make it a permanent part of our jobs. You deal with that employee now and forever, we’ll deal with the business.
Left hinted at but unsaid was the implication – very definitely not,/i> a threat – that every f***ing one of us would suddenly come down with solid, verifiable, corporate-legal, bullet-proof justifications for missing a week or three of work.
In our business, this worked. AFAIK, that employee maintained a paid position for several more years, we never saw, or heard of, that employee again, corporate remained the brain dead, worthless fetid swamp it had always been, we re-organized and restructured the group’s work to accommodate the additional workload, and lived, perhaps not happily ever after, but much wiser and with a great deal more control over the work environment, which was almost the same thing. Which was easy to do without the random and periodic crises the now missing employee created.
That probably wouldn’t work in the world of patient care, but maybe a version of it could have some sort of positive impact.
JimmyPx · February 1, 2025 at 11:40 am
I’ve seen several companies do a variation of that called a “special projects” group. Slackers would be transferred there overseen by a slacker manager that they wanted to get rid of and they were given BS assignments. The slackers loved it because their slacker manager never checked for attendance or hassled them and they could goof off all day when they were in the office.
Then once a year, the company would have a RIF and oh gee the “special projects” group was Riffed. This is an ingenious way to get rid of dead wood without affecting your good employees.
Illinois Hound · February 1, 2025 at 5:16 pm
I would assume your ID badge has a chip in it. If security were to put a lock on the door that required using your badge to get in and out a paper trail could be created showing how much time was spent. It doesn’t take 2 hours to milk a cow.
Aesop · February 4, 2025 at 9:11 pm
Hospital manglement is generally worthless.
A state’s Board of Registered Nursing, however, takes negligence allegations seriously, and they will step over a hospital to suspend or revoke a nurse’s license directly if a complaint is sustained.
Times, dates, patients involved, etc. are crucial.