One evening while working short, I heard a resident yelling. This struck me as odd because the patient did not communicate well at all. I went into the room and there was an aide punching and cussing at this lady. The lady happened to be one of my favorites so it really angered me when I saw this. I grabbed the aide and pinned her against the wall.
Once the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the death toll had significantly risen. For Afghan women, their greatest obstacle is child birth. On average, one Afghan woman dies every thirty minutes due to pregnancy related causes. (Walsh, 2007) The national maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan is 1600 for every 100,000 births, which is second in the world next to Sierra Leone. (Walsh, 2007) Healthcare for expectant mothers was a major issue.
The Human Resource Management team has the ability to make the necessary changes to combat the nursing shortage. Rearranging workloads amongst staff members alone would help immensely. The majority of nurses experience burnout from a combination of factors such as age, emotional tiredness, depersonalization in the work area, and a feeling of underachievement being that so many tasks are placed on any one individual. We must remember that illness will always be around. Without the help of Human Resources, the problem of maintaining a healthy patient to nurse ratio will continue to grow.
Some patients were also made to shower with their clothes on. The program un-covered serious abuse within the Hospital and there was a public outcry. Several people wrote to the Prime Minster who was reportedly “appalled” by the findings. The national regulator Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) involvement, Ms Margaret Flynn was asked to investigate what was happening at the Hospital and undertake a Serious Case Review. Whilst investigating she spoke to patients, workers, NHS staff and family members and learnt that there was a high level of physical intervention by the staff and some of the patents very badly hurt with some seen to be self-harming.
This affects approximately 5 million Americans. (Levine, 2003) This paper will examine three articles that reflect differently on elder neglect and abuse. The first article estimates the prevalence and extent of elder abuse. The second article discusses signs and symptoms of elder abuse and what clinicians should be looking for and acting on when abuse is suspected. The third article focuses on a case study in which an elderly woman was abused and no proper investigation was completed within a nursing home setting.
Approximately 1.6 million people are in nursing homes in the United States, and another 1 million people reside in residential care facilities. In the year 2000, there were 472,813 cases of elder abuse or neglect in the 54 states in the U.S. This number is just a rough estimate of the abuse cases, as many cases of abuse or neglect go unreported. In fact, according to a study conducted by the National Center on Elder Abuse at American Public Human Services Association, every time one case of abuse is reported, five cases of abuse go unreported. Older adults are among one of the fastest growing populations of the United States; in 1990 one in eight persons was older than the age of 65; by 2030, this ratio will decline to one in five (Wan, Sengupta, Velkoff, & Debarros, 2005).
The head nurse, Nurse Ratchet, is the main antagonist and the person most interested in attaining power. Nurse Ratchet is an evil lady who enjoys inflicting mental anguish among the patients in the institution; this pain is almost portrayed as a way to make herself feel better, feel superior. She brings up painful past events and shows absolutely no emotion or compassion for her patients. This coldness from Nurse Ratchet is what really enrages the patients causing them to rebel and repel her authority. Randle McMurphy is the patient at the Oregon institution that most rebels against Nurse Ratchet who in turn always tries to keep him in line as much as she can.
On one occasion a service user (S.U) was distressed so kept pulling the buzzer. I asked on a few occasions if she needed any help but refused to tell me what was wrong. A member of staff came and asked the S.U what was wrong in a calm and reassuring tone to show the S.U that she was there to help. The S.U told the member of staff that she was upset as during the night the nurse didn’t come to see her very often during the night and she couldn’t get in touch with her partner as he wouldn’t answer the phone. She then became very upset and began to cry.
Examples like this and many more occur in our lives commonly, but we’re not always aware of it. To clear up, another example would be that when I went to my friends house she was yelling at everyone and she was acting really angry, I thought she was being really rude, careless and disrespectful but later on I learned that her mother has been in the hospital the night before so she was exhausted and worried for her. Fundamental attribution error is a part of our lives, which we experience by not having empathy or simply, by having misjudgemental
The fatigued nurse becomes overwhelmed and can easily make mistakes such as medication errors or performing procedures on the wrong patient. They also begin to lose compassion for their patient and become more task oriented. Often times it gets to a point where they are just showing up for work and lose sight of their original desire to help an ill patient get better or make a difference in their patients day. We go into nursing with the intention to help people who need it and share with patients our nurturing personalities but that sometimes gets lost in the tangled web of stressful situations, long work weeks, long shifts, increasing patient-to-nurse ratios, constantly changing field, and not enough education on the support systems in place or methods for coping. One thing I’ve noticed to be very common with nurses is remembering to take care of themselves.