RN Oversight Can Save Lives
What would we do without caregivers? Family caregivers and caregivers by trade alike. This is undeniably something taken for granted by those who have never needed a caregiver. But the stories we hear on a daily basis about all they do - from the little day-to-day things to going above and beyond the call of duty - are nothing short of amazing. In fact, one recent story from our Wakefield MA homecare provider is a great example of this:
"We received a call as a response from an advertisement that we ran in one of our area’s parish bulletins last Friday. The call was from a woman whose mother lived in a neighboring town. She was looking for general help for her 89-year-old mother for bathing and some shopping needs, either accompanying her or performing some rudimentary errands for her. Some other health care agency would have simply dispatched a CNA to start performing these tasks for her.
As standard procedure in any case received like this from our Brightstar office, an RN, in this case my Director of Nursing, was dispatched to perform a preliminary initial assessment of the elderly woman’s needs (on a Saturday!), her living situation, home safety review, and review of the woman’s over-all health. What my DON discovered, unbeknownst to the woman’s daughter and hidden under her sock, was that the woman was suffering from cellulites on her right leg. The leg was purple with a pitting edema, and threatened to become septic. Red serosanginous drainage was occurring and was outwardly draining from the area of the leg. My nurse called her doctor and strongly recommended that the woman be examined and admitted. She was taken by her daughter to an area hospital ER and was then immediately admitted as an in-patient."
Click here to continue reading about what the doctors found when they took the woman to the ER and how RN oversight saved her life.