Reasonable Patient Care

Patient care is a very important aspect of all nursing/healthcare professionals and facilities, especially to an elderly patient that cannot talk, walk, or feed themselves. These patients are dependent on health care providers and nursing staff to provide reasonable care by following a standard of care. “Standard of care is the obligation of healthcare professionals to do NO HARM and their duty to provide reasonable patient care” (Towsley-Cook, D. & Young, T; 2007). With that being said, healthcare providers are to provide quality care based on national, state, & facility standards, and are to do no harm to patients. Reasonable care can be described as the degree of care in which a reasonable person, in a similar situation would provide. In

Though the facility does not have whirlpool baths the nursing assistant should of notified prescriber of that issue due to patient’s already fragile condition, therefore physician could of provided alternatives or edited the current plan of care for the patient. Secondly the patient was unable to talk so extra precautions should have been taken in regards to the quality of this patients care, such as checking water temp before placing patient into it, this particular patient was unable to verbalize if the water was too hot/or too cold to nursing assistant so the assistant should of checked it by touch or by using a thermometer to check degree of water. There are always alternative options for patient’s that require extra care, and that is the healthcare providers’ duty when they are caring for patients. The failure of a healthcare worker to provide duty and/or mistreat the patient, and cause to cause harm to a patient makes the healthcare provider liable in a medical negligence

First off, the nursing assistant could have doubled checked with their supervisor or the prescribing doctor on specifics for treatment since actual prescribed treatment was unable to be provided at their facility due to not having a whirlpool bath. The assistant could have doubled check on specifics such as if patient should still receive daily baths, what the water temperature should have been, and/or if anything could be added to the bath to help ease pain/discomfort. Another option would have been to take more careful measures such as checking the bath water before putting the patient in the water, whether it is by feeling it personally or with a thermometer. When relating to caring and communication, a safer environment could have been provided by being more empathetic for the patient whom was unable to express their feelings due to the inability to walk, talk, or feed themselves. Like I said before, the quality of patient care is a very important aspect of healthcare. Even though the patient was unable to verbally communicate with the nursing staff, there are always ways to open up the communication, like maybe giving the patient a hand to squeeze if the water was too hot, or if the patient experienced any pain. Taking measures like these could have helped them to not suffer such a terrible injury on top of the already complicated health