Hotel California!!!
Throwaway.
I’m so tired of everyone checking in & never leaving & most people not getting real help.
I’ve been a night clinician full time at an ER for a little over a year now, and honestly, it’s gotten so awful. It used to be healthy mix of people needing help, the occasional dementia patient with a bx disturbance.
But the last 6 months have been brutal. I switched hospital sites within my company (same bosses, often I’d have to leave the old site & go to my current because current has higher census), and while it was a little better, the same issues hit my current ER.
We are a revolving door of nursing homes sending out dementia patients for hitting, and needing them until we admit them to GPU. 90% of our GPU patients are people that have been there over 6 months to multiple years, as nursing homes won’t accept them because of their pasts. Then the ones we have in the ER, they have to get IMs & restraints so they don’t wander around & possibly get hurt. Most of them are dementia with bx problems, not even true Geri psych. Our ER doesn’t have a separate place for Geri & adult psych, either, and I’m always so scared something’s going to happen.
Then I have nurses sending out paralyzed stroke patients & 95yo hospice patients for “SI statements”.
The unhoused come in so frequently looking for a warm bed, and it’s just gotten worse and worse since policy changes. If we admit them, they often times walk back in the er once discharged from the unit. Or they go back out & go right back to their patterns again…People will ask to be admitted because of the weather or something else sad. People also don’t want to take their meds, at all.
The aggression & attitude is also so bad recently. I’m constantly being spoken over or yelled at before I can finish a question.
My bosses are also asking way more of us for things with no compensation. I haven’t received a raise since hiring or moving to the new site, as well as was never offered reimbursement for time spent going back & forth between the sites.
Has it always been like this and I was just naive? Or has it been horrific for any other states lately? I’m from New England, USA.