Bad bosses busted

Years ago I worked as a state tested nurse's aide. The nursing home where I was employed was not a nice home. I wouldn't even call it a step above the county home. It was kind of a slum/sweatshop. Unaware of conditions in the home, I'd applied there because it was in my neighborhood.

I trained for three weeks, took the certification test, and was put on the floor. According to company policy, I was supposed to train another four days under the supervision of an experienced aide. That it didn't happen should have been my first clue, but I was new to the health industry. I had no idea what was coming.

Instead, I bought into the nurse's line that we were just temporarily short handed because someone had called in sick. So, on my second day, I was sort of dropped into the regular work routine, sink-or-swim. I swam, but not with a lot of confidence. However, it was left up to me to figure it out. After my third question regarding patient behavior or conditions that were not noted on their charts, the nurse got impatient and told me to shut up and do my job. That was my second missed clue.

The third was the lack of cooperation among the aides. We had been taught in class that most residents who could not stand up by themselves were "two man lifts." In other words, the person was either too heavy or too fragile to be lifted by one aide alone. When you needed to transfer a "two man lift" patient between bed and chair, you were supposed to ask another aide for help. This prevented injury to both us and the patients. I found within the first week that most aides were not willing to help the "newbies" lift. We had to seek out and ask each other. Some of the aides were lifting the "two man lift" patients by themselves, because if you didn't get your work done fast enough, you got written up. I was written up for looking for help lifting a 300 pound immobile, nearly vegetative patient. On the form, I wrote in that I felt the write-up was unjustified because I was following policy, and couldn't have lifted the guy by myself even if I had wanted to. The nurse who wrote me up threatened to write me up for insubordination because I put that in the "employee comments" section of the page, but the head nurse told him that he could not.

There were more incidents like that, but it was a month before the worst hit. One day, I was greeted beside the time-clock with a special order from my floor's nurse. Two people had called in. No one could come in to work their shifts. We had to divide their patients among us, and instead of having the legal state maximum of 14 patients, I was going to have 21. I was not to ask the nurse for any extra help, and I had to squeeze the same care for those extra 7 people into my normal shift.

I was a first shift worker. That means it was my responsibility to get the patients all out of bed, help them bathe and dress as needed, give them their breakfast trays, feed those who could not feed themselves, take the trays back to the cart on time, transfer patients to physical therapy as needed, take them to the dining hall for lunch, give them their lunch trays, feed those who could not feed themselves (again), take the trays back to the cart on time (again), and during that time, squeeze in showers for the 1 in 7 patients (three today) whose day it was to get a shower. More than half of my patients required assistance with everything. Most of them could not walk without the aid of a walker or wheelchair. During that time, I was also responsible for answering any call-button lights, in case patients needed to use the restroom. Also, any patient who was unable to move under his or her power must be moved to change the position of his or her body a minimum of every two hours, to avoid bed sores.

Getting patients up in the morning varied from patient to patient. Several of mine were unable to feed or dress themselves, so making sure I took care of all of their needs without getting behind schedule was a nearly impossible challenge. You can't just rush through these tasks. If you are not careful, you can injure your patient, or yourself.

I got through that day without any really bad incidents, but I did get written up for not being fast enough. That is not what was put on the paper, but it is the translation of what was said. Basically, another aide needed to shower a patient, but I was still in the shower room with mine. The patient had unknowingly defecated, a common occurrence. That happens enough that I never showered him without a bucket under his chair. All I had to do was carry the bucket out of the room, in to the attached bathroom, and dump it in the toilet. Unfortunately, that was going to take both hands, because it was also full of water.
My patient also required both hands. He was a fall risk, meaning that if I didn't watch him like a hawk, he'd try to get out of the arguably uncomfortable shower chair, and fall down. I could not just turn my back to clean up the mess.

I pulled the call button to ask another aide to watch him while I flushed the contents of the bucket. We waited, and no one came. My patient began to shiver under the blanket, and fidget in his seat.
I decided that I couldn't just keep him in there indefinitely. I buzzed the nurse's station, but no one answered. So, I wheeled my patient out into the hall, where I was startled to find the next aide waiting for me. I asked why she hadn't answered the call light, and she said she hadn't seen it. She was standing right under it, and it was accompanied by a repetitive, computerized tone, so I knew that was a lie.

I told her about the bucket and asked her to watch my patient for a minute while I cleaned up. I told her that was why I had turned on the light. She refused, stating instead that she needed the room now and would just clean it up herself. Behind her was another patient squirming uncomfortably in another shower chair. We were supposed to make sure the room was open before wheeling patients down the hall with nothing on but a bath blanket, and now she was impatient with me for using the time slot allotted to my patient. I wasn't even late getting him out of the shower... I was early!

I couldn't do anything about her attitude, so I just took care of my patient. Moments after I'd finished getting him dressed and settled into his favorite easy chair, the nurse called me down to the office to write me up for "leaving feces in the shower for the next aide to clean up."

I recounted to him what had happened, but he ignored it and made me sign the paper under threat of being fired.

The next week, we had more call-ins, and more illegal workloads. I went to a supervising nurse to discuss the issue. I happened to know of a temp agency that would send aides if the company would just call them. Since it was illegal for us to be that understaffed, I figured the supervisor would be glad to know where we could get help with the problem. Instead, I was reprimanded for "rocking the boat" and told "we don't do that." The supervisor threatened to fire me if I disclosed to any of the families that we were understaffed. I informed her that I was family. My grandmother was temporarily housed in one of the rooms on another ward. That did not go over well.

The nurse assumed I would not know the system for reporting violations. I did, but I was still naive enough at that point to think I could work with corporate on fixing things. I called the human resources number and talked to one of the supervisors there, telling her everything I'd witnessed at work, and how at-each-other's-throats the aides were getting. Corporate held a meeting with all of use to hear grievances related to how things were being run at the site. Afterward, they issued a finding that there were no problems, and three of the four most vocal aides were fired. I was the only one retained, and I was written up for insubordination for statements I'd made under the assurance that they would not be held against me. Again, in the comment section of the page, I wrote my opinion of the reprimand, noting that the statements had been both true and made under the assurance of confidence and impunity from corporate supervisors. The nurse took a black permanent marker and "redacted" everything I wrote.

The last straw for me was coming in that week to find that we'd had so many call-offs that I was assigned a double group. I had 28 patients to care for. The nurse told me we weren't getting anyone out of bed. One of my patients was so heartbroken about spending the day in bed "again" that she cried. I realized that this was not an issue my employer was going to be willing to address.

At the end of my shift, I went home and called the Ombudsman for the elderly. I explained the situation, giving dates for the times when we'd been illegally understaffed, and listing several other violations of our patients' rights that I had witnessed. I gave a list of the names of the people in the company who I had alerted to the problem, and explained that I'd made them aware of a temp agency where they could bring in aides to stand in for those who were ill. I described injuries I'd discovered on my patients which were consistent with carelessness and neglect. I talked to the lady on the phone for half an hour. She was appalled.

An investigation was initiated. The Ombudsman showed up without warning on a Monday, the worst day for call-offs. Her timing was perfect. Halfway through the morning, no one was out of bed. Every aide on the shift was responsible for 28 patients, and it took her nearly half an hour to find a nurse. She wrote all kinds of things in her little notebook.

The next week, the head nurse changed the schedule without warning, right in the middle of the work week. She waited until I had two days off in a row, then scheduled me to be there for one of those days. When I didn't show, they labeled me a no-call no-show. I called the Ombudsman's office and alerted her to the retaliation. She asked if I wanted to fight for my job, but I really didn't. I was only getting minimum wage, and I'd learned that aides at other nursing homes made half again as much just starting out. I just wanted to make sure she knew that the company had retaliated against the whistle-blower.

In the meantime, my family removed my grandmother from the home a month early, and made sure to tell corporate that the decision was a direct result of living conditions there. She would have her physical therapy at home.

An employee who had worked with me and survived the whole thing stopped me at the grocery months later, and told me what happened after that. The state had taken over management of the home. There was also a huge fine. Several supervisors and a few nurses had been fired, including the man who had repeatedly wrongfully written me up. There were dismissals at the corporate level. Everyone who knew about the problem and had not addressed it was fired.
Laws were meticulously enforced. A lot of changes were made at the home, including the way fall risk patients were handled. As a result, working conditions also improved. The state kept charge of that home for nearly a year before agreeing to transfer managing control back to the corporate owners. A lot of policies were changed, including the policy of not using temps to cover for sick employees. In fact, the home went to using temps as a hiring method. Instead of hiring off of the street and training aides, they would bring in temps, and if they had the right attitude, work ethic, and bedside manner, there would be a full-time job offer.

In addition, employee concerns related to how policy was being followed (or not) on site, and whether laws were being followed, increased in priority. There was now a genuinely anonymous reporting system for on-the-job safety and patient concerns. Alleged retaliation by any supervisor was grounds for an investigation, and if it was found that there was retaliation, that was grounds for dismissal.

The company had made some very expensive mistakes, but apparently corporate had learned from them.

You can't safely assume your employees are ignorant of the laws governing your industry.
You can't safely assume your employees don't know their rights.
You can't safely assume your employees won't feel a moral obligation to protect their clients, even at your expense.
Your employees will only take so much crap from you before they turn on you. Even those who don't know how to fight for themselves will back the one who does... and there will always be someone who does.
You won't get away with illegal activity or conditions indefinitely. Eventually you will be caught.
And most of all, you can't fight city hall.

In the end, it's cheaper to do things right the first time, stay within the law, and treat your employees like the human beings that they are.

Bad Pick-up line

The elementary school my son attended has a system for pick-up and drop-off.
There are four sets of kids who attend the school:
Walkers - kids who walk to and from school (the smallest group)
Bus riders - kids who arrive and leave on big yellow school buses
Car riders - kids who are not bussed, whose parents pick them up and drive them home
Day Care - kids who are transported to and from school by a vehicle owned by the
.day-care they attend.

The school has organized pick-up with specific routes for all four types of entry and exit with the idea of kid safety in mind. The issues they wish to avoid are the danger of accidents (car and pedestrian), the danger of kids getting overlooked and left at school, and the danger of kids being kidnapped (there's been one non-custodial parent who tried to take his kid - the police had to be called,) and the possibility of a kidnapping scare when both parents show up for the same kid due to some mis-communication (which has all ready happened once but was quickly resolved on the grounds.) These aren't older kids; this is a k-4 school. The kids ages (in August, when school starts) range from four to ten.

The flow of traffic is organized to avoid the above-mentioned dangers and issues. The buses pick up on the opposite side of the school from the side where the parents pick up, and the day care kids get picked up several yards away from the car-riders. The walkers leave through a different door, and are led away from the school and accompanied a full mile by an adult crossing guard in a reflective vest.

Cars picking up kids come into the lot through one driveway, form a line, pick up at the door, and continue in the same direction, leaving through another drive at the other end.
At that end of the lot is a circular drive, like a cul-de-sac, except the end is open to the "road" that goes past that end of the school. That is where the day care drivers park. The cars go on the left side of the cul-de-sac to avoid risk to the day care kids.

It's all very well organized, and would work great, if it weren't for a fifth group; the Hoverparents.

There used to be a small number of kids whose parents would hover by the door until school let out, then grab their kids, and go. At the beginning of the year, this group comprised of less than five. This group should be very small. During my son's last few years there, one set of parents was justified in being there because their child had a serious, non-custodial parental kidnapping risk. The rest didn't really need to stand around the building, but some were waiting for kids who couldn't leave until everyone else did.

Parents of the kids in the safety patrol do not crowd into the line, because our kids can't leave until all of the other kids are picked up. Because of this, ours are the last kids to be picked up. We do still have to be there, throughout the process, because the time it takes varies by up to ten minutes, and the teachers do have lives outside of school, so it would be as rude for us to make them wait as it would for us to get into line knowing we're the last parents to pick up.

When my son was there, the Safety Patrol parents always parked our cars and waited until the line was gone. Some parents waited in still-running cars. Others waited where they felt they could better see their kids doing the safety patrol job. I liked to watch my son while chatting with whichever parent was there to pick up the child mentioned above. Unfortunately, halfway through Autumn, parents who did not have kids in safety patrol began joining the hoverparents, crowding onto the paved area around the school's main door. I became concerned that the group was getting too big for the teachers handling the end-of-day exit to monitor safely.


The hoverparents group continued to grow unnecessarily, including many parents who were there simply to beat the line. One day, there were enough parents there to pick up an entire classroom full of kids. There were some near-accidents in the lot that were so scary that onlookers gasped like an audience watching acrobats in a circus. It was just crazy. There is no sense in risking one's life, the lives of one's children, and the lives of others, in the pursuit of shaving a few minutes off of the time it takes to pick up a kid at school. Soon, my concerns were echoed by a few other parents and some of the teachers. Since I didn't actually need to stand by the door, I decided to set the example and switched to watching from my car.

When it boils down to it, none of us except for the kidnapping risk family actually had to be in that space waiting for our kids, and with the number increasing, a lot of confusion had been created. This presented a number of dangerous circumstances.

The most likely danger to lead to an actual disaster involved the flow of hoverparent car and foot traffic.
Car pick-up parents began lining up at the door a full fifteen minutes before the Kindergarten kids got out. The rest of the grades came out three minutes after that.
Hoverparents began arriving at about the same time as car parents, and the flow of that traffic continued throughout pick-up, with cars driving in and out of the lot, cars backing out of parking spaces, and pedestrians crossing traffic to get to their kids, and then to get their kids to their cars.

To get to the parking spaces in the school's narrow lot (just enough room for two "lanes" of traffic in between the sets of perpendicular parking spaces,) the hoverparents had to drive past the line of car pick-up parents, both in the lot, and on the street before.Then, some of them used the "left" lane to try to exit the lot through the "in" driveway, going against traffic like a salmon swimming upstream. More than once, this caused a traffic jam.

Parents were passing cars on the street, driving in the left lane for up to fifty yards to do so, then turning left into the school's lot. These parents jealously guarded their place in "line," turning left in front of oncoming traffic if they thought the driver coming toward them was trying to "cut." Several times I saw near accidents as people driving past the school were nearly hit by angry parents who assumed they were other parents trying to cut.
Once in the lot, hoverparents didn't bother to slow down much. They seemed to not understand that this was a pedestrian area... until they were the pedestrians.

Then, they would walk in front of moving vehicles without looking, and get angry when tires squealed and horns honked at them.


I normally arrived at about 2:00 to 2:05, before there was a long line in the street, and while crawling my van through the lot to find a space, I'd usually had another mom behind honking at my slowness. I rarely could get through that lot without someone driving halfway up my tailpipe. In the meantime, I had to watch for parents crossing in front of me without warning, some of whom assumed the horn they were hearing was mine. More than once I got the finger for no reason.

I also had parents nearly back into me because the don't look when they back out of parking spaces after grabbing their kids. When I had to go into the building for something during pick-up, I was nearly hit walking to the door from my car, as parents speed out of the line after picking up their kids, wanting to get on their way, not looking for pedestrians before they gunned it and went. In the meantime, parents in the line of picking-up cars didn't always recognize the danger of letting their kids get in on the unprotected driver's side of the car instead of the passenger side, where the sidewalk is. Every day I watched kids going out into that careless stream of hoverparent traffic to get into the back of cars.

The accident risk was huge! I don't know how we got through the year without someone getting hurt.

The second danger presented by the hoverparents was in the chaos they created. When it was just a small group by the door, the school staff could keep track of who was being picked up by whom, making sure that no kids were leaving with someone who shouldn't be taking them.

Once the group increased in size, it created exactly the kind of dangerous situation which made my buddy concerned about his daughter's safety in the first place. With too many people to keep track of walking up to the school's main exit, it would be way too easy for someone to grab a kid and run, especially if it was someone the kid knew and didn't understand he/she should fear, like a non-custodial parent or a "nice" neighbor. Also, someone parked in a close-to-the-door spot could grab a kid and run, and be out of that lot before anyone could stop them.

The third danger isn't one most people would think of. With an extra flow of pick-ups to monitor, there is the chance that a kid could be left out or forgotten. A child who does something out of the ordinary, such as returning to the classroom for a forgotten item, going inside to use the restroom, or visiting the office with a question, might be overlooked. Because the hoverparent pick-ups were ending up not accounted for, school staff might not realize that one kid is missing. Knowing who is picking up whom, and when each kid leaves, is vital to the staff when trying to monitor the safety of each child. A missed kid could be stuck there for hours... and an unnoticed missed kid might even try to walk home.

One day, staff members were trying to figure out what to do about the issue of the Hoverparents (no, they didn't call us that - that's my assessment of the behavior.)
Listening to the discussion, I could hear a serious amount of stress in their voices. Their biggest worry was that harm would come to one of their little charges. Their concerns are valid - I'd seen some really close calls in the accident department, and I didn't know all of the parents who I saw standing in front of the school every day. Some kids did not even get picked up by the same people every day.
Unfortunately, the teachers were quick to realize that they could not directly control whether or not people chose to hoverparent. They could give orders, but had no way to enforce them as long as the kids were all ready out of the building.
As the staff continued to brainstorm, and idea struck me, and I made a suggestion, which they really seemed to like:

Why not set up a sign-out for the car-riders whose parents do not get into the car line? The kids could be kept inside until an authorized person was there to take them. That way, school staff would know who is picking up each kid and what time they left. It would slow down the hoverparent pick-up process enough to discourage parents who are hovering just to get out faster, and protect kids in real at-risk situations from potential predators who should not be able to snatch them and run.

They could even direct the hoverparents to a separate area, such as the gym, to pick up their kids, thereby making it even more inconvenient and slow to be a hoverparent. It would mean a few days of getting out late, but after the point had been made, the number of hoverparents would probably shrink to one.

The idea was seriously considered, and the staff was interested in implementing it, but they were overridden by the administration.

Guess why!

The administration had been fielding complaints from the hoverparents that the line was slowing them down. Some of them had even complained to the school board.

That's right. The people who weren't doing it right were complaining that everyone else, by following the rules, was inconveniencing them, and they got their way.

Instead, the teachers at the school ended up having to become traffic cops, actually placing their own bodies in the parking lot's parent-created "passing lane" to keep the dangerous group of hoverparents, and a new group of line-jumpers, from endangering everyone with their inconsiderate choices. They dealt with the hoverparents by physically getting in the way of their cars and holding a set of them back for each wave of lined-up parents they allowed to leave. Only when the line was not movie as kids got into cars were hoverparents permitted to drive through the lot.

In the end, this method did work. By making hoverparenting inconvenient and slow, they slowly encouraged parents back into the line. By the end of the year, hoverparents were down to a handful, and the pick-up was down to a science. There had been several near-accidents in the process of making that happen, as parents tried to drive around the teachers directing traffic and nearly hit them, but no injuries occurred.

It's just sad that educators had to risk life and limb to teach adults how to wait in line for 5 minutes.