Sixty two

When ER patients stay WAY beyond their discharge.

I get a lot of guff from patients and co-workers about cutting off patient armbands after they have been discharged from the ER. Patients and their family members and I think the public in general sees the arm band as a sort of strange badge of honor. Ive had serious "discussions" with patients about the validity of an armband once it's cut off. "I have to show it to my boss" I always explain that well we also gave you a work excuse and your name is still on the arm band even after we cut it off.

I've been told by a lot of co-workers that it's trivial bullshit on my part to cut off armbands, naturally I scoff at that and then tell them this little story.

I was at my first ever ER tech job after getting off the ambulance and really dug the hospital I was working at. It was a moderate level one on a weekend night crew that was seemingly always understaffed so naturally all of were close. In fact even to this day if I run across another person who has worked at that ER ever I give them a lot of deference. I digress though.

I never thought twice about cutting off armbands then. In fact I would think it would be safe to say I never did it was not standard practice. Then all hell broke loose after someone did not cut off the ER arm band of a particular patient. When I say all hell broke loose I mean on a corporate level. I was working for a large corporation hospital whose interests lie over several states.

What happened was that someone from my shift (It could have been anyone of us) did not cut off an arm band. The patient and her family then packed up all their stuff and went to the little used strange corner of the hospital that was the "overflow" for the maternity ward. In my time at this hospital I never saw patients go up to this area. Sure you would walk through it to get to the other older part of the hospital, seriously though no patients or staff were ever assigned these rooms.

There in this semi-abandoned corner of the hospital was where this family stayed for a little over a week. By family I mean father, mother a couple of kids and a grand parent of some sort as well. "Preposterous" you may think certainly person from security would have picked up on this with their patrols. Um...no. Keep in mind this is a corporate chain of hospitals, security is low on their priorities, the security went to the lowest bidding security company and I hate to say this you get what you pay for. Our security personnel's primary focus was patroling the parting decks keeping all the cars safe especially where the corporate hacks cars were parked. This naturally caused probs in the ER later, that's another story though.

Well then a doc, nurse, tech or other hospital personnel would have noticed. Well not really, I'll get to that in a moment. In your daily wanderings in the hospital do you even pay attention to the people you pass in the hospital that look semi-normal. Also in the entire hospital's defense it was a couple of years post 9/11 in a part of the country NOT known for terrorist attacks and mass shootings. Noone thought twice and if they did ask they were promptly shown the patients arm band that was still attached to the discharged patient.

Finally after a little over a week someone noticed. It was a house supervisor who gave a fuck (another words who did their job) noticing this patient for the umteenth time and running over to a computer and running the record number and seeing that the patient was discharged over a week earlier. Security was called and since they were just really low level parking lot observers the local police were contacted and showed up.

As the police say "upon further investigation" they all found this family living in a room on this little used corner of the maternity ward that was nowhere near a nursing station that was in use. Turns out that the family was contacted several times by hospital staff but once seeing the still intact armband on the patient let them slide because they had an intact armband. The family made many visits to the cafeteria and in fact some how were getting trays delivered to the room. They had found a linen cart and were getting fresh towels and sheets from it and had even gotten toiletries (soap and toilet paper etc) from the hospital as well. I would even go as far to say that this was epic.

This got the attention of the hospital's corp types and then on up the chain to regional corp. Naturally the family got tossed out on their asses by the hospital. I don't know if they were homeless or not and it was all hushed up this incredible story never made it to the local news. Well shit went up in the air and landed right in our laps there in the ER.

We all got lectured to for weeks about the prompt removal of armbands from patients upon discharge. In fact they then went to different colored arm bands for the ER just in case. The admit clerks were to cut off the ER arm band if the patient got admitted. We had to keep up with the armbands and I'm sure someone some where was keeping count. It became policy in our ER to cut off armbands no matter where the patient came from and put on our own and that the armbands we put on patients in our ER were hospital property and to be retrieved. If you missed an armband and it was found that you neglected to collect it you were verbally warned then got written up for your lack of attention to this particular detail. Seriously, no shit.

Yup this happened. So that dear readers is why I cut hospital arm bands off of patients now. I'll even say you should too once a patient has been discharged from the ER.

Reality is quite strange sometimes.