Comments on: Is HELP on The Way?

By: admin

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:09:04 +0000

You’re absolutely right, Mike….and speaking as a nurse, we were never trained that this is NOT how it has to be. Nurses are responsible for WAY too many patients and barely have time to do a head-to-toe physical assessment, let alone be at the bedside long enough to recognize what is going on.
This program could be of help to so many hospitals.

By: Mike Gamble

Mike Gamble — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:46:59 +0000

This is an excellent article about an excellent program. It should be required reading for every hospital administration and nurse. And, it should also be read and taken to heart by every family caregiver.

While my mother never experienced delirium during her numerous hospital stays, I’ve heard first-hand reports about it. Unfortunately, most nurses dismiss it as, “Oh well, that happens sometimes; s/he should come out of it in a day or so.”

By: Eleanor Jodway

Eleanor Jodway — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:35:16 +0000

Thank You Shelley for taking the time to bring this information about HELP to a wider audience!! It was a great article!

Ellie

By: Carol Wright

Carol Wright — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:26:05 +0000

This sounds great. When Mom was hospitalized for zone out behavior surrounding digestive upset of some sort. When she was in pain, which felt like heart pain and couldn’t breathe, she’d zone out. Of course that’s when the doctors wanted to poke around to see where it hurt…then she got combative and yelled she just wanted to die. Variations on that while hospitalized. After she got rep for being combative, they put her in a caregiver babysitting room, complete with other deranged woman who was in total agony and screamed with hoarse voice. It was hell even for me.

I put mom on noise canceling headphones to watch a video, and when she was finished, she came out of her cocoon to this woman’s hellish voice, a combo of drunken sailor and agonized cow moaning and screaming…so that sent her off again, and the doctor scheduled a palliative care team meeting cause obviously Mom was an Alzheimer’s nut case, on the way out of this life.

Anyway, such a team would have been great. I feel I have to be there pretty much all the time when Mom is in the hospital, cause the nurses can’t tell if this is NORMAL behavior, or she’s really in trouble. To them, she’s just resting, but I knew the zombie coma behavior, one that she could come out of, coaxed out with Junior Mint, we discovered.

HOPE it gets instituted everywhere, but meanwhile individual nurses and CNAs can learn some techniques in house…or take example from this program and just be aware of it. Reality is instituting a program such as this takes a long time, and for my mother, the clock is ticking.