Originally Posted by
justakiwi
You will be hard pressed to find a retirement/aged care company to invest in, that hasn’t experienced at least one similar incident. The stated inability to obtain urgent prescriptions outside of business hours, is a real problem, and is not the fault of the facility. We can not prescribe medication - we are reliant on GPS and pharmacies as is the general public. If this poor man had been able to get antibiotics sooner, maybe he would have survived, but there are no guarantees. Where I work, if we are concerned, we would do an immediate transfer to hospital, but you would be surprised how many unpleasant calls we get from ED later, questioning why we sent Mr/Mrs X in and telling us they are not bad enough for us to have done that.
There are many people involved in these situations so please be mindful of that. I am not saying they handled this particular case well - I am not an RN so that’s not a call I can make. I’m just giving some perspective as someone who works in a rest home, and is often supervising 32 residents, with one colleague, and no RN on site.