r/cna • u/Every_Cry_5356 • 3h ago
How am I supposed to change 13 people in 2.5 hours?
At my job for NOC shift, we’re not allowed to wake the patients early to check or reposition them. We’re supposed to let them sleep. So we only change and reposition them once besides passing out ice water. I see other CNAs start changing residents at 5AM and finish all of them by 6:30AM so they can return the cart to the laundry lady who gets mad if we return it after that time. Well yesterday I got an assignment that I was unfamiliar with (because they keep jumping me around while other CNAs get a fixed assignment). And in my assignment, I basically had to go from one wing to another wing because it was just basically random rooms that other CNAs do not want.
For my assignment, I had 16 residents and 13 of them needed to be changed and repositioned. 5 of them are on g-tubes so I had to get the nurse to turn them off. Well I asked the nurse at 3AM after my break if she could please turn them off so I can start changing them and she tells me it’s too early. I told her my assignment is very heavy and I’m unfamiliar with these rooms and she’s like yeah but morning shift doesn’t change them right away so they’re just going to be sitting in their soaked briefs if you start changing them too soon. Well my thought process was since it literally take me at least 15 minutes to change someone because I have to wait for the water to get hot (we use towel and water), gather all my supplies (we don’t have a linen cart so we have to get it one at a time from the supplies)…not to mention my rooms are all over the place so I have to factor in the time to get there. Well the nurse starts turning off the gtube at 3:30AM and it turns out pretty much all of the patients couldn’t even assist in rolling so it’s very hard to change them. One of them was a 200lb+ man and he couldn’t even move his body because he was in pain. I’m a 150lb woman and I basically had to do my best to roll him myself. And you may ask, why did I not ask for any help?? Like we don’t do that here at all. When I was training with my preceptors they all tell me, try not to ask for help and try to just do it yourself because there’s not a lot of people during NOC anyways. Also I had like 2 patients (thankfully females) who kept throwing punches at me as I was changing them. Their grips were so hard they wouldn’t let me brief them up. Another man was soaked everywhere so I had to do a full bed change/gown change and that took a while for me as well. When I finished, it all took me a little after 6:30AM and of course the laundry lady got mad at me because she wants it returned latest 6:30AM.
I dont know if it’s just me but when I was training with my preceptors we didn’t have to change that many people?? Like they only had 6-7 incontinent patients. I’m the newest one here but they did this with a girl that I became close to who had to quit and she was getting like 10+ incontinent patients and would often finish late as well.
Am I just really slow or is it not normal to be assigned 10+ incontinent patients with a lot of total dependents?