LogFAQs > #883789718

Ok, not retail, but the topic's been branching out a bit:

Disclaimer: If you have a loved one in a nursing home, you may want to skip over this post.

I work for a DME (Durable Medical Equipment). We contract with nursing homes and hospices to provide equipment to patients in facilities as well as at home. I've been at this job for about two and a half years now, and overall I love it. I meet a lot of interesting people, and I get to provide a valuable service to patients in need. That said, there are some horror stories.

Being that we provide medical equipment, during off hours we have drivers (like myself) on call for emergency issues such as equipment failures or after-hours hospice admits. We have about a dozen branches scattered across the midwest, and when I'm on call I take calls from all of our areas and dispatch them to the appropriate branch's on-call driver (or if it's my area, I run the order myself).

I was on call yesterday, and last night I got a call at 1am. A nurse called and said that they were out of woundvac canisters for a patient. For those of you who don't know, a woundvac is a device that gently suctions through a special dressing applied over a wound. It draws out excess fluid and actually facilitates the healing process. The machine has a canister attached to store the fluid it suctions out, and the canister needs to be periodically changed as it fills. So the nurse says their patient is out of canisters, and they need more. Right now. At 1 in the morning.
Now, under normal circumstances the nursing home should be calling us during regular business hours to order more dressings and canisters when they get low, but someone at this facility failed to do this. Now the patient's canister was full, and they wanted me to send a driver out to deliver more, right then. Rather than put a regular dressing over the wound until the morning when we could deliver more supplies, I had to call the driver and send him out. So instead of someone doing their job and ordering disposable supplies when their stock gets low, I have to get someone out of bed to clean up their mess. And this driver still had to work at 8 the next morning. GG, nurses.

I recently got an order (regular business hours, at least) for a malfunctioning concentrator. A concentrator provides concentrated oxygen to patients by pulling in room air and separating the oxygen from the other gasses. The flow rate can be adjusted per the patient's needs. The facility is about an hour's drive, so I start heading that way. When I get there to troubleshoot the concentrator, I turn it on and there's no o2 flow at all, but the machine isn't alarming as it normally would if there was a mechanical problem. It takes me all of 10 seconds to realize that someone had turned the flow rate all the way down to 0, and apparently no one in this facility could figure out how to turn it back up (hint: you literally turn the dial - the only dial - on the machine up above 0). The nurse looked embarrassed as hell when I explained the issue as I had her sign my service ticket.
---

"a minority is someone who you can tell off the bat they are black/hispanic/colored. LGBT isn't a minority" - Blakkheim1