Hospital Jobsworths pt. 2
Hospital visitation policy: no children under 11 allowed before 1 pm, unless they have a new brother or sister. Pretty simple, huh? It caused more problems than anything else.

Volunteering writing visitor badges, I had to be the bad guy to enforce this policy. At least once per shift, someone would get huffy and challenge the policy. "Oh, this must be a new thing." "No, this has been policy since before I started here." I would then be told (as if I were a simpleton) to get on my little phone and call the nurse's station and see if that was really the policy. Of course, the nurse's station would tell me to send the little sweeties up. Which would get me condescending smiles from the visitors. On the last day I worked (the same day of the broken vase in another post), it happened again 30 minutes later, at which time I was told by the nurses NO KIDS UNDER 11!! and that I couldn't keep calling up there everytime a kid showed up, but *deep sigh* go ahead and send them up anyway.

Some satisfaction, though, the head nurse walked past my visitor station and I grilled her about it. We either have a policy or we do not, and I'm tired of being the bad guy. Now back me up on the policy you gave me to uphold. She hemmed and hawwed. Enough of this. I got better ways to spend my Saturday mornings.

Hospitals are nothing but hotbeds of ego and nurse's social clubs. They're not about the patient anymore. I don't miss working there at all.
( setimret likes his metaphors mixed, not stirred, Mon 16 May 2005, 17:10, Reply)