You are a Family Nurse Practitioner working in an outpatient primary care office
ID: 126914 • Letter: Y
Question
You are a Family Nurse Practitioner working in an outpatient primary care office of a large hospital system. The practice has been operating for over 15 years, and many of the administrative and clinical staff were hired when the practice opened. You have been in the practice for less than 3 months. In that short amount of time, you have witnessed several of the clinical staff have heated arguments with each other, sometimes in patient areas. Today, one of the back office assistants didn’t come to work. Unfortunately, this pattern of behavior is not unusual in this practice. Your clinical schedule is especially busy. Working without appropriate office staff will negatively influence your ability to spend time with patients, impede the flow of patients through the office, and could impact patient safety.
Discussion Question:
How should you logically respond in this situation? Provide rationales and evidence to support your decisions.
Explanation / Answer
Out patient department will be very busy with all firsts time coming, emergency and follow up patinents. Though there are enough staff in every department, one department people may not fullfill the other department roles in their abscence.
Here in this scenario, it is really difficult for the nurses to handle the patients recording thier vitals, guiding them for the right doctor. After the consultation is over they need to pay the bill and send them to further investigations, we should hand over them to guiding people, meanwhile if stuck one patinet in entering thier detials others has to wait for a long time.
At times patients may require fit to work, fit to fly certificates, Counselling is the best treatment for the patinents, they need to spend time while explaing them about medication and all, so there are lot of responsibilities to handle with the patient in out patient departmetn. Due work overload in a confusion if nurse does any mistake it will under medical negligence which will affect patient's safety.
In this case we should apprach OPD manager to arrange some till the time OP ends. Also complaint to HR regarding indecent behaviour in the wards, they will take re training session on professional behaviour. If it doesn't happen hospital reputation would spoil.
If they can't control this patien's will feel bad about the service and they wont recomend anybody to get treated in this hospital, hospital rvenue will fall and we loose our jobs. We work for patients safty, we can also lead smooth life.
During induction itself they should teach about prfessional behaviour, hikes for profesional behaviour and leave policy, if follows the hospital rules we can save the patient's lives. Medical people always have replation with the people, they cant work mechanically, so the service should be 24/7. 24/7 service should have a alternative employees to manage some one's abscence.
Doesn't matter when you joined, just raise voice for the safety of the patients to run OPD smoothly.
Related Questions
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.