Yelled at by RN today
I’m a hospital CNA and I’m honestly still annoyed about what happened at work today.
For context, I had an issue with this same RN yesterday because she didn’t communicate a new admission’s care needs to me. She told me the provider hadn’t put orders in yet and that she would update me when they did. She never followed up, and then toward the end of the shift started questioning me about why the patient hadn’t gotten a CHG bath and why his 4 PM Q4 vitals weren’t done.
I told her I had never been informed that either of those things were needed and that if she had communicated them to me, I would’ve done them. She told me I was “remembering it differently,” and afterward I could see her talking about me with another nurse at the nurses station.
Fast-forward to today, and I’m working with her again.
From the beginning of the shift, she seemed noticeably short with me.
Around 8 AM, she asked me to clean up a patient who had spilled his urinal. It wasn’t just a quick cleanup — he needed a total bed change and he’s a two-person assist. I told her I needed help because I wasn’t comfortable doing it alone. She told me I should be able to do it myself because she was busy, but said she’d come find me when she was finished with what she was doing.
She never came back.
Eventually, I had to ask the charge nurse to help me.
Then later, she was literally inside another patient’s room passing medications and had the physical therapist leave the room, come find me, and tell me that the RN wanted me to empty the patient’s urinal.
I assumed it had probably already been emptied because the RN was literally in the room providing care, but she eventually came to find me herself and asked me to do it.
I said, “Oh, sorry, I saw you were working with him, so I thought you had done it.”
She told me she was super busy and hadn’t gotten a break yet, so she needed me to do it.
Whatever. Emptying urinals is obviously part of my job. I went in and did it.
But the weird part was that when I walked into the room, she was STILL in there actively working with the patient. So I basically walked into the room, emptied the urinal sitting next to her, and walked back out.
At that point, I was starting to feel like some of this might have been because I had spoken up for myself the day before.
Then around 10 AM is when everything blew up.
Earlier that morning, I had promised another patient that I would give her a shower around 10 and help detangle her hair before her visitors arrived. Around 10:15, the RN asked me to help her put a sling under another patient because he needed to go to CT. I asked if it was urgent. She said yes, and I said okay.
At basically the same time, the daughter of the patient I had promised the shower to came up and told me her mom was ready.
So I asked another CNA if he would be willing to help the RN with the sling so I could take care of the shower I had already scheduled.He said yes.
Problem solved, right? Apparently not.
The RN came up to me and, very aggressively, asked, “Are you not going to help me?”
I explained that I had already committed to another patient and that another CNA was willing to help her instead.
She rolled her eyes and walked away.
A little later, while I was gathering supplies for the shower and bed change, she came up to me AGAIN and said something like, “So you’re giving a CHG bath instead of helping me?”
I told her no, I wasn’t doing a CHG bath. I had promised this patient a shower before her visitors arrived, I was also doing her hair and changing the bed, and it was probably going to take me close to an hour. I reminded her that another CNA was willing to help her.
She scoffed at me.
At that point, I asked, “Are you okay? You seem kind of…” because she very obviously seemed irritated with me.
And then she went off.
I don’t remember every word exactly, so I don’t want to pretend I do, but she basically said I hadn’t been helping her, she had asked me to do multiple things, and after I had been “disrespectful” to her yesterday, she was “over it.”
I told her yesterday’s situation was unfortunate, but I had simply been trying to communicate that I never received report on that patient and wasn’t trying to disrespect her.
She continued arguing with me, loudly.
At that point, I told her, “I’m not going to engage in this conversation. You’re being very disrespectful right now.”
She said something like, “Yeah, well, we’ll talk about it later in private,” and stormed off.
And here’s the part that REALLY bothers me.
This happened at the nurses station/hallway in front of basically everybody.
There were multiple nurses and CNAs standing there who witnessed it. One CNA who was doing a 1:1 in a room down the hall later told me she could hear the argument FROM THE PATIENT’S ROOM.
Even worse, we were directly outside the room of the patient I was supposed to be showering. Her door was open.
So the patient AND HER DAUGHTER witnessed/heard this nurse arguing with me about my job performance and accusing me of being disrespectful.
I find that unbelievably inappropriate.
If she genuinely had an issue with my performance, why not pull me aside privately? Why are we having a loud argument about an interpersonal issue at the nurses station where patients, family members, and the entire unit can hear it?
Afterward, I spoke with the charge nurse at length about the situation. We had a great conversation, and the charge nurse said she would try to talk to the RN and see what was going on.
Shortly after that, I saw the RN storm to the nurses station and say that she “wasn’t doing this.” She then left, called staffing, had herself marked sick, and did not give report to the RNs she had handed her patients off to.
The charge nurse later told me that when she tried to talk to the RN, the RN was very upset and wasn’t willing to engage in a conversation. She also apparently didn’t have nice things to say about me or the other CNAs in general. The charge nurse said she would escalate the situation to management.
I also found out that the RN texted our manager while the manager was off that day. I was advised to file an incident report, which I did.