practically unavoidable...
falls?...again, there is so much red tape regulation in using ANY restraint plus it is profoundly discouraged by the regulatory agencies that restraints are seldom ever used...thus, you have old people climibing out of bed by themselves and falling....you know, "dignity" in aging...you have druggies and alcoholics climbing out of beds, Alzheimer patients, dementia.....UNLESS THE FAMILY CAN STAY IN THE ROOM....AWAKE....24/7 these falls are going to happen, period...
these people in the ivory towers have no a clue....not a single clue...how an acute care hospital gets by....intense,constant,back breaking work prevents further problems...
eg...we had HALF of our patient load on my floor under isolation..flu, mrsa, rsv, you name it....yet we have visitors in and out of rooms without gear, using public brs, going down to the cafeteria and there is absolutely no legal authority to prevent them......and people wonder about hospital infections...
You said it well. Also,when Medicare drops its reimbursement to a hospital, they have to fire more staff, so the complications increase.
Some hospitals seem to avoid infections much better than do others.
thus, you have old people climibing out of bed by themselves and falling.
And you have patients climbing out of bed by themselves because the staff won't respond to a call button.
You come across as having a casual attitude about patient safety. Do you have a high percentage of 'practically unavoidable' infections on your shift?
One of the local hospitals has a terrible reputation for infections for post-op surgery. I won't name hospital names, but it wasn't really terribly shocking when a couple of nurses turned up with Ebola there.