Woman forced to sleep in chair for a year

Aunty Em

Aunty Em

Well-Known Member
All I can say is that I'm as appalled as the Judge with the way this woman has been treated:

Nurses are not allowed to lift Lorraine Wolstenholme, who weighs eight-and-a-half stones (55kg), into bed in case they hurt themselves.
Her barrister has told the High Court the treatment of Mrs Wolstenholme, 50, is a violation of her human rights.
She is unable to get in or out of bed by herself as a result of her illness.
Her 27-year-old daughter Karen has taken a year off work to look after her and can manage to get her mother out of bed into the wheelchair, but she cannot get her back into bed.
Mrs Wolstenholme, who enjoys shopping and other activities, has decided she would rather remain in the wheelchair in her specially-adapted council bungalow than be bedridden - probably in hospital - for the rest of her life.
Her counsel, Murray Hunt, told the court how the nurses who assisted her to get out of bed were withdrawn by the trust in June last year because of the perceived dangers of lifting her.
Mr Hunt said: "Too much weight was attached to the interests of the carers and not enough to those of the disabled person".
Ms Wolstenholme was diagnosed with MS in 1995, and suffers from involuntary spasms which the Milton Keynes Primary Care Trust says could pose a high risk of injury to its staff if they attempted to lift her.
Ms Wolstenholme has refused "invasive" treatment to control the spasms because she fears the effects of the medication to relax her muscles.
Mr Justice Ouseley, sitting in London, rejected an application from Mrs Wolstenholme's lawyers to make an interim court order forcing the trust to provide lifters pending the legal challenge.
He ruled that it would be "too much" at the current time to order staff to lift Mrs Wolstenholme out of bed, or risk going to prison for contempt of court.
But the judge commented: "I do find it quite extraordinary that no means can be devised for lifting an eight-and-a-half stone woman once a day safely, or reasonably safely."
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http://www.ntlworld.com/partners/itn/britain/658968.php
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I read that in the Metro this morning. While I can see where the NHS is coming from on this one I still think they should get more speciallist carers
 
Its more about the involountary spasms but if you are that sort of a nurse a few bumps and bruises are expected with the territory
 
steweygrrrr said:
Its more about the involountary spasms but if you are that sort of a nurse a few bumps and bruises are expected with the territory
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I'm sure. Yeesh in the old days nurses were the size of a house and strong enough to put olympic weightlifters to shame :eek6:

People are gettin' soft.
 
I've lifted 12 stone patients on my own in the past without injury... you don't need a university degree to know how to lift correctly, just the right training... which they are obviously not getting...

I have become more and more disgusted with the standard of basic nursing care in this country and am almost ashamed to admit that I'm a trained nurse myself...
 
... and in keeping your lower back straight while you lift... plus proper positioning of course...
 
Luis G said:
Fire the damn nurses and hire another ones that are willing to lift her. :rolleyes:
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I totally agree! There have got to be other nurses out there willing and trained. This is totally ridiculous! :eyebrow:
 
Luis G said:
Fire the damn nurses and hire another ones that are willing to lift her. :rolleyes:
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Exactly......people are getting too used to whinging there way into soft jobs.......thousands of folks out there who aren't scared to use their muscles.
 
[glares@nurses]
Whiny frigging biotches!
My stepdad is like 68, and yet he was able to assemble our waterfountain out in front several times. It consists of 4 tiers along with the rocks that go in between each tier. We brought it back from Monterey, and it's made out of like rock.
Fsck sake, and that's that he's not getting paid to do it.

I'd so fire their asses, and tell them to get tae fook.
 
The trouble is, they turned nursing into a degree course to try to get more people into the profession, but that does not predispose people to getting their hands dirty, so to speak...
 
Aunty Em said:
The trouble is, they turned nursing into a degree course to try to get more people into the profession, but that does not predispose people to getting their hands dirty, so to speak...
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Yes and no. There is a hell of alot more to nursing than lifting a patient. For the task at hand, you dont need a trained nurse to complete it. A nursing assistant or an old style "orderly" would suffice just fine.

You dont necessarily take a person who has spent 4 years at a university learning the detail of anatomy, physiology, microbiology, pathophysiology, pharmacology, and every medical speciality from OB/gyn to newborn, to cardiology, to neurology, to endocrinology, to gastroenterology, to hematology, to orthopaedics, to infectious disease, and everything in between and give them a job where the most important task they do in a day is to "lift somthing".

Thats like asking an computer hardware engineer to lift boxes of computers all day. Its a completely inefficient use of resourses. You want the trained medical professional using thier skills in a more apporpriate utilization of expertise such as triage, or ICU, or watching a cardiac telemetry monitor, or double checking medications, or performing a dressing change, or doing drug calculations, or performing physical assessments, or performing patient education and you want the untrained/unskilled/semi-skilled/ lower paid lower trained personal doing heavy lifting and giving baths.
 
I'm a trained nurse, so I'm well aware what's involved in both nurse training and the job itself.

So because a nursing auxilliary is not available you would leave a debillitated patient wet or dirty so that they develop bedsores, or an elderly person unable to feed themselves to starve?

That to me is not caring for my patients, it's neglecting them... think of the reports of elderly people becoming dehydrated in hospital just lately because nobody helped them... unfortunately with the state of the NHS sometimes you need to do a little hands on basic care, which means you need to know how...

... and since when has the NHS ever been an efficient user of resources... certainly not in my lifetime... and I've been a nurse for 29 years...

Most nurses specialise btw... over the course of a long career you may well fit all that lot in in some depth, but most subjects are only touched on in basic training... it's not until you actually get on the wards that you really learn to be a nurse and put some of that knowledge into practice.
 
Aunty Em said:
I'm a trained nurse, so I'm well aware what's involved in both nurse training and the job itself.

So because a nursing auxilliary is not available you would leave a debillitated patient wet or dirty so that they develop bedsores, or an elderly person unable to feed themselves to starve?

That to me is not caring for my patients, it's neglecting them... think of the reports of elderly people becoming dehydrated in hospital just lately because nobody helped them... unfortunately with the state of the NHS sometimes you need to do a little hands on basic care, which means you need to know how...

and since when has the NHS ever been an efficient user of resources... certainly not in my lifetime... and I've been a nurse for 29 years...
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No I never suggested that I simply pointed out that a mis-match exsisted between the personnel choosen for a task and the type of task that was expected.

I advocate doing what is necessary at the time to deal with a given situation, but that is not enough. You cant simply go about putting out fires and doing crisis intervention without ever considering the root cause of the problem.

There has been a growing demarcation in the field of "nursing care" with regard to the various skill levels of personnel working in the field since the early 90s. This trend is steadily growing and evolving. The state of patient care when viewed from a global stand point is ever advancing as the science of medicine advances. The further the field of medicine advances, the more and more skilled nursing personnel have to be to perform certain functions and the greater the "knowledge gap" between various ancillary health care functions. There is getting to be a huge knowledge gap now days even from one registered nurse and another. Modern day nurses if trained and educated properly, have a knowledge of medicine nearly on par with that of a Medical Doctor just a decade or more ago. Other nurses can barely keep up with administrating medications and completing "tasks". The sooner the general society and the medical community wake up to this growing disparagement the better everyone will be and the sooner nursing care can be re-examined to provide a better delivery of health care.

I dont know what the NHS is however, can you clue me in? All though I am familiar with "basic" and "ward" we consider those outdated terms where I am from.

As far as Im am concerned, there is nothing "basic" about a nurses training or the care that needs to be given.

Im not advocating that patients be neglected. Quite the contrary. I have witnessed patients being neglected because the RNs were too busy with critical patients to provide baths, hygiene, psycho-social, and other much needed care. The patients in turn suffer. What I am saying is that we need to examine the system to prevent this from happening and make sure that the right people are performing the right tasks.
 
The National Health Service - UK... if you wanna call it that! Sometimes I wonder... :lol:

Basically, there are too many administrators and not enough people on the wards... it's just got steadily worse since I first began my training all those years ago... when You've only got 4 nurses to look after 30 patients it isn't funny!
 
Aunty Em said:
The National Health Service - UK... if you wanna call it that! Sometimes I wonder... :lol:
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Gotcha,

Well Im have a Bachelors degree in Nursing, and Im liscened as an RN in three states (USA).

I have only been doing it for 8 years, but I can tell you that it is sickening how much my patients have suffered due to staffing problems.

There have been many nights where I had to stay right on top of a patient who had Rapid Atrial Fib with low blood pressures, or who were confused and had every thing from A-lines, to Swan Ganz lines to chest tubes, to trach collors, to oxygen masks, and you cant leave those patients alone for more than a couple minutes because they can pull out these lines and what I call (self-destruct).

So what happens to the other patients?

Well you figure it out...it sucks for them.

What Im saying here is that they should not have been neglected their bath and custodial care because THOSE DUTIES SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN ASSIGNED TO ME IN THE FIRST PLACE WHEN ITS SO PAINFULLY OBVIOUS THAT I CAN NOT DEAL WITH THESE PATIENTS, PASS MEDS, TALK TO THE FAMILY MEMEBERS, TALK TO THE DOCTORS, CHECK THE LABS, REVIEW THE CHARTS, AND GOD FORBID..HAVE A PATIENT CODE, OR HAVE AN ACUTELY ILL PATIENT TO CARE FOR.

Somthing has got to give and 9x out of 10, its baths and psycho-social support.....which really made me mad enough to say "fuck it", "I cant give these patients the care they deserve" and quit....back in 99.
 
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