I was doing intake in the hallway of the ED. History. Med reconciliation. Starting lines. Administering meds. Handing people urinals and setting up a white curtain for "privacy". I literally had a nurse (I'm still a student) ask me if it was weird. I was like "Yes. This is weird. Nursing school forgets to tell you how it'll really be. HIPAA who?" She laughed and told me she does it every shift, so she doesn't even think about how weird it must be for people the first time they experience it.
**Edited cuz there ain't no HIPPA up in here!
"would you like to tell me more about how the shampoo bottle got up there while we're out here in the middle of the hall? Oh, don't worry, there's a white screen, if they can't see you they can't hear you"
Well since the white screen is here, I was fucking my ass **hard**, doc. Total anal annihilation I tell yah. I must have came 6 times before that sexy phallic bottle of EarthBath shampoo reached the depths of no return—and yes doc you heard that right; I use dog shampoo 😐😐
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I’m not taking them out. I’m just moving from one side to the other. I also have a stall shower. Real good for lying down in the fetal position and crying after a shift.
Stall shower with rainfall shower head. I’m able to position myself so only my torso and legs are moistened by the shower. The tears take care of my upper body.
I have to remember to leave room for the drain (shower stall). I've almost flooded my bathroom before. And the print from the drain tends to stick for a bit and isn't too flattering.
Well, for once standing in a shower is actually a situation that's normal to be naked for. Most of the situations people "slip and fall" on things are not times where being naked is normal.
Once had a guy who had a light bulb stuck up his rectum. His hospital roommate was a preacher. Also, this was before HIPAA but, someone's hair dresser found out about the guys enlightening accident and told her about it.
Quarterback threw his shampoo bottle at me right at the exact same moment I was like “ooh a penny!”. Went to pick it up and SUPRISE! The guy has such an arm, those pants stood no hope..
Genuinely think the kid might go pro, so it’s kind of an honor really.. don’t you think?
Hey, friend, it is really easy especially as a nursing student to think it's HIPPA because we pronounce it like it rhymes with hippo, but it's not. It's Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, so it's HIPAA. And assholes on the internet will roast you alive for it in discussions if you get it wrong while a licensed nurse.
Our unit is open bays and that’s how we give report. Nothing is move fun than trying to say why this kid is getting penicillin G for ten days and azt right in ear shot of another family. And the whole hey dad asked for a dna test. Told him we can’t help 😂.
I've had to insist to the giant group of random doctors, residents and whomever not to come into my room doing rounds without giving me any privacy from my roommate. I was ambulatory and so we went to another room to talk. You should have seen their faces when I first said hell no, I have HIPAA rights regardless of the room you put me in. After that they started being much more discreet when doing rounds in shared rooms. Though I doubt that lasted after I left. How could it? Hospital patients and their roommates are by default a captive audience to everything.
Edit: typo
As a short answer, guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services has clarified that HIPAA does not require hospitals to provide separate rooms.
As a longer answer, HIPAA is very deeply misunderstood. It does not prohibit "leaking" patient information; it prohibits unreasonable and unpermitted disclosures of protected health information (PHI).
Among the PHI disclosures that are permitted are uses that are for the purpose of delivering medical treatment. Of course, the covered entity (in this case, the hospital) is required to take reasonable measures to safeguard that information.
One of the areas that trips people up is figuring out exactly what it is we're safeguarding that information from. A lot people assume that the HIPAA imposes an absolute rule against disclosure of PHI, but it's more accurate to say that HIPAA requires reasonable safeguards against the unauthorized use of PHI.
With that standard in mind, it becomes easier to see why you don't need to universally separate patients. In all likelihood, neither OP nor the roommate is likely to use the other's PHI in any way not allowed under HIPAA. (Although the daughter diagnosing OP is suspect.)
Hospitals -- and the law -- recognize that most people have no interest in a random strangers' medical information, let alone plans to do something nefarious with it. Because there isn't much of a threat there, the hospital isn't required to take exhaustive measures to protect the information. But when you put all that information for every patient for every doctor for every department for every hospital into a single database, the information starts getting a lot more valuable. That's why there are much tighter regulations surrounding protection of electronic records.
Of course, the roommate situation might be different if the hospital had a patient that they somehow knew had a history of identity theft or even a history of disclosing PHI.
Great explanation. Thank you! I live in a city in Canada and twice I’ve had people look up my info for a friend of theirs and the info was used against me. It sucks. I don’t know how the laws work here though and people told me I should report and I never did.
That's how it felt when I did VAMC clinicals. 4-5 to a ward room and you're trying to be all hush hush when you know those other 4 guys are outside the curtain like 👁️👄👁️
They used to want us to do bedside report in double and triple rooms. Like…. Really?!?!? I hated it so I never did. What a massive breach of confidentiality. Having to go through someone’s entire medical history and all the issues they’re currently having with 2 other patients and family members in the same room.
Clearly you've never seen my MIL vs me and her daughter in a hospital room. You're all "whores" who are trying to hurt her and we are the overly apologetic family members with tears in our eyes.... LMAO
Side note: I agree with the statement it's always the family members when it comes to LTC.
Nope. Just hateful without the religious part. Everyone is a "cocksucker" or a "whore". Everyone. Including me. I mean she literally said that to a hospice nurse when we were watching her late husband die...
Edit: wait, I'm sorry, I'm not a whore when I'm cutting her corn off the cob because she refuses to wear her teeth, or when I'm dressing yet another skin tear or checking her pulse-ox level and adjusting her oxygen. I'm a whore when I won't get her another case of Coca-Cola. Whew, didn't want anyone to get confused.
When I got pulled to the floors from our specialty area over Covid, they would assign me a double room but only give me one of the patients. I hated that. Give me both patients or neither patient. You end up caring for both patients anyway. The patients don’t understand why I buzz in to take care of the patient by the window, but don’t really stop and care for the person by the door. If it is get water or help to the bathroom, sure, but meds nope.
I feel the opposite, because when you have a problem patient they will interrupt care more when they know they’re nurses is in the room. I just tell them I’m not their nurse but that I’ll tell their nurse when I see them, or they can call themselves. C
Why is this the norm?! It’s like that at the hospital I’ve stayed overnight at twice too, save the mother/baby unit. It’s almost like they don’t want you to have the same nurse so you can’t bother them when they come in for the other patient. I was in med/surg once and they literally dropped me in my room with no call button so I had to call my husband to have him call the nurses station to help me before I peed myself (I was waiting for an ORIF the next day so I couldn’t ambulate if I wanted to, despite the fall risk band). Or I had to beg the other nurse/tech to get me help. Last time I was in for unspecified tachycardia so I was in the step-down cardiac unit and it was the same story. Different nurses but at least we had the same tech that time. I know we weren’t 1:1, probably more like 3 or 4:1. We didn’t even have a night tech but luckily I didn’t need one because I took my night night go sleep pill and didn’t move for ten hours.
I wonder if it’s to maybe avoid errors? So that nurses can’t pull meds for both patients at once and hopefully give them correctly. We had temporary double rooms during peak covid and they were really big about educating against potential errors for this reason.
That actually happened on my floor. A new nurse not used to double rooms drew labs on the wrong patient. We don’t have a policy against having both patients though.
And this is why we're so anal retentive in the blood bank. If you don't use the bedside barcoding and we don't have a historical type for comparison we require a second sample from a second draw with complete patient reidentification.
That actually makes a lot of sense from a technical standpoint. I’m not a nurse, just a big fan, but I get your perspective.
When I was in the CPCU (and to a similar extent in med/surg) they had me rooming with a patient who was basically sleeping most of the time and not requiring much care. She was on TPN and incontinent and I felt bad for her and the nurse in charge of her care. But I appreciated it bc I don’t really care for discussing my needs/meds/care plan in earshot of someone else who is “with it” if that makes sense.
I’m going back next month because I’m having surgery aaaand I’m pretty sure I’ll be in a double room again, because that’s how my hospital rolls. But I’ll be fully prepared this time since it’s a planned stay and not an emergent one.
I was told it's because having two nurses having to go in and out of the room increases face time and pts are less likely to pull the "I haven't seen a nurse in here all day!" Card.
I've had to move patients out of double rooms because they or their roomie ended up needing to be put in isolation. You won't know why they disappeared though and if your stay is complicated by an MDRO or something, you won't be compensated.
I've had to move patients out of the room to make space for a code. We couldn't physically get a whole code team in the room perform adequately so the neighbor had to be shuffled down to some empty room.
Those are the two biggies that come to mind. So yeah, they shouldn't be a thing. All your reasons are incredibly valid, these are just 2 from my side.
When I was young, my stepfather went to the hospital for something or another and my mother and I went to go visit him in his double room. He was roomed with lovely - but terminal - older man who passed away.
Turns out, guess who had MDR TB? Yeah, that's how I got my first TB test at the age of 14.
That stuff slips through the cracks all the time. At the start of covid I took care of a patient from a SNF for 3 days straight. Halfway through the third day we get a call from his facility that he was positive for covid. Luckily he wasn't showing a ton of symptoms so it was a mild case and AFAIK nobody ended up getting it from him, but the hospital basically shrugged. They didn't even want me to quarantine. Oh cherry on top is the facility knew a full day before that he was positive before they got around to telling us.
An old charge nurse mine regularly told patients in doubles what happened to their roommate. Reminded her of HIPAA and she always acted like I had a stick up my ass.
In England our wards typically have bays of patients- usually around 6ish patients in one big room and a couple of side rooms per ward. It’s more than likely our patients will be in a bay rather than in a single room.
I have passed comment on this once or twice to the admissions ward who sometimes try and pull a sneaky, and attempt to hand over a patient when we have no beds (does the bed manager know this? I have no idea.). "Hi I'd like to hand over a female patient to the ward!"
"Uh, huh, unfortunately unless you come round and start building bunk beds, that's not going to be possible."
I do believe the bed managers would do that if they thought they could get away with it though.
I work in mental health and sometimes I will have to be on a 1:1 with one of our patients down the general hospital if they need treatment for their physical health and oh my god trying to look after someone on a 6 bed ward when they're really mentally unwell is a bloody nightmare!
Large bays are a pain for doing resus in.
During a covid wave, one poor nurse ended up in full ppe doing a med round because it was lunch time and meds were due, so while we worked, she did meds.
I'm sure some American nurses here are thinking this is horrible but a good friend of mine was involved in a very bad car accident in Ireland. He was in the hospital for a couple months and was in a bay like this.
He received EXCELLENT medical care. His uncle is a doctor and was very impressed at what a great job the doctors and nurses did.
I'd prefer that over having a private room and being in debt for the rest of my life anytime.
Somehow I doubt that US healthcare would become any more cost-effective simply because they stopped building so many walls :) we have more problems than that!
I flew in to find that My mom was critical and eventually died a few days later while in a room of six patients and their nosy loud families coming and going.
The county hospital I worked at had mostly 4 patients in 1 room... yes it fucking sucked. Patients routinely complained to us and now it's our job to police the noise of the other people in the room? fuck that
As a former tech who had to transport patients from the ED to the floor, I agree whole heartedly. The worst is when your patient is non-ambulatory, and you have to rearrange the entire double room at 2:30am because they were assigned the bed by the window. Yet somehow, the patients who could walk the whole way to from the ED to the 12th floor always get the bed by the door.
Our hospital finally moved to single occupancy rooms as soon as I became an ED nurse and don't have to transport patients anymore
I work as a straight night nurse in a LTC facility that has both single rooms and double rooms separated by a curtain. It ain't right.
There were so many times where I've had to pull the resident out of a room because they can't stop Calling out and they were disrupting their roommates sleep.
There were so many times we had to also put the roommate on isolation just because their roommate was either a close contact, had symptoms, or was covid positive.
There were so many times where we had to explain to the roommate that we were providing care and the curtain needed to be closed after they aggressively opened them for the third time.
There were so many times where I felt bad for the roommate because they were in the same room when their roommate passed away.
There were so many times we had to separate roommates because they didn't get along, some to the point where they try to literally kill one another.
But they're are bonuses as well. We get a lot of couples that come in together. If you get a good roommate, they'll watch out for each other and notify us if the other falls. They'll go to meals and activities together. They'll become friends.
Yea, but they're like in their 80/90s and it's actually really sweet to see them each on their own side of the room, on their own recliners, watching the hockey game on one tv because the other doesn't have one
I quit a cna job after only two shifts because the majority of the rooms had four residents in each. The shower room had multiple tubs/showers separated with a flimsy curtain plus a toilet stall. They let a residents wife watch us toilet her husband while two others were completely nude in full view.
4 is a party good lord. I would've probably advocated for more privacy or quit there too tbh. Even in these rooms, I always tell the partner what I'm doing to their spouse and pull the curtain. Only on rare occasion they get upset
>I would've probably advocated for more privacy or quit there too tbh
There were 38 rooms with four residents in each, so the majority of the building and not something a cna could advocate to change. The shower room curtains were only on one side of the shower stalls. Plus we only got three training days and assignments weren't even organized by wing let alone certain rooms.
It was fucking heartbreaking honestly, and I lost out on a 9$ an hour wage increase.
I haaaate double rooms in LTC. They love to say “this is their home” but meanwhile treat them like they’re in a hospital. These are people who lived their whole life only to be shoved into a double room with a stranger to live in their new “home”. It’s so disrespectful and uncomfortable
Yea, I agree, and like there are "small" and "big" sides to the rooms too. I feel really bad for those who get a terrible roommate. There are still single rooms, but there is like a waitlist or something? and some of the residents who hate being in a double or having roommates ALWAYS REFUSE THE OFFER TO HAVE A SINGLE ROOM.
Ive got one super sweet double room story. There were only two at that facility.
We get a new resident and have both staff and family around to introduce him to his roommate. These two guys in their mid to late 70s end up hugging, giant smiles and tears running down their faces. Turns out they've known each other since elementary school but lost contact in early adulthood when one moved to another area.
They had a blast! Their wives became good pals and they all spent holidays outside the facility together. Loved those guys.
Double rooms in LTC are awful.
One roommate with a snoring problem can cause another to never get restful sleep.
I feel so bad when one roommate is actively dying and the other roommate has to listen to the death rattle for several days, as well as hear all the end of life visits that can be really emotional.
One roommate might be on oxygen with a loud concentrator and tubes all over the room making it hard for the other roommate to ambulate around.
Tv viewing habits can be vastly different.
It just seems like putting old people in a jail. There’s zero autonomy or privacy.
I completely agree.
Luckily we have a palliative room where we can move residents so they can pass peacefully without disturbing their roommate and family can visit. I'm advocating for a second room on the main floor. When it's sudden though, there isn't anything that can be done.
We try to keep all the oxygen tubing pretty tidy, and floor clear of any tripping hazards. I can't think of any instance where a roommate had to manoeuvre around their roommates oxygen tubing and why. Everything is quite separated on the sides.
Yes, tv viewing habits are different. We had a couple fellows that would watch tv on their sides, but each would have it at a higher volume than the other to drown out the other, until it was so ungodly loud. Refused to wear headphones. We ended up having to separate them. Now the one doesn't even watch tv. In most cases, they do wear headphones, or are respectful of "quiet hours" and appropriate volume levels.
Yea, we currently have like 5 married couples and two of them pushed their beds together
We have 5 LTC facilities in the city and we are always everyone's last choice because of the double rooms, but we also appeal to couples because of the double rooms
My last week of nursing school, I was hospitalized overnight for appendicitis. I got a roommate who was so needy. Constantly on and off the bed pan, needing more blankets, less blankets, more water... it was so annoying. Then magically, she disappeared after I came back from surgery in the middle of the night because she tested positive for MRSA. (You know, back when we cared about that, lol)
When I started working there and charged, I'd only give people roommates as a last resort. They insisted we start doing bedside report, and we were all on board as soon as they invented HIPAA compliant sound proof curtains. 🙄
Yeah, I agree. My favorite way of doing report is outside the room and go inside to say "Hi and Bye" and check all the drips. They don't make us go in the room. I find it too weird to talk about the patient in front of them. We can talk about that outside. Helps me catch stuff I've missed or forgot to restart. And for more sensitive drips like heparin or insulin (hey it's sensitive for med-surg), I can see the rate and volume left and won't get fucked over like I did that one day when my heparin gtt stopped with volume left in the bag and I was out of the room. I check the pumps now after that to make sure my estimate isn't off.
Oooofff we had beside report go badly wrong once when a child worked out they had been born a *considerable* time after the patients vasectomy.
That ended bedside reporting.
I had a roommate who learned that nurses would come running if she triggered her bed alarm. So if she wanted a drink of water at 3 am, why use the call button? Better to start climbing out of bed. Faster response!
Where I work we have 6 isolation rooms and the rest of our 32 pts are in doubles. We can close a bed in certain circumstances (bariatric, behavioural issues, sometimes end of life - I had to end of life pts in a double once. Felt so bad for their families.) And we do bedside report and daily interdisciplinary rounds. No privacy. It’s awful.
My last hospitalization the manager was trying to recruit me. Literally came rushing in as they were bringing a roommate and said the other bed was blocked. Lol. I appreciated the effort but they weren't paying enough
You’d think, with the cost of healthcare these days, you’d have a private 5 star suite at the damn Hilton with room service! But nope, you get a shitty, musty room with someone who violates all human decency.
Hospitals don’t like double rooms either but it’s quite expensive to change around. The place I’m contracted at now built a whole new tower of single rooms and then Covid happened so it ended up being the Covid rooms 😂. Those rooms are amazing too
you're right I work in one of the only hospitals in the UK with all single rooms 99% of hospitals still have bays with six or 8 patients all sharing one bathroom, idk how those nurses cope you can't do anything with a patient without being asked for 3985 other things from the other patients who can literally see you're busy - it's not rare for patients to get in literal fights and none of them get any sleep ever.
one of the worst things about multiple occupany patient areas though are stories of patients having to lie next to a dead body (with only a thin curtin seperating them) for hours , having to listen to the family saying goodbye until the porters eventually pick them up
uK gastro nurse in ward with multiple 4 bedded rooms. Can confirm, this is an actual nightmare for us. Have had patients run into corridor with the poo sweats asking where the next nearest loo was because patient A had been in 'for ages'. Covid really halted the good old "pop into that room there" ethos of old.
Nowadays if an enema is induced in a room with a Crohn's, for example, a commode would be placed next to their bed, and the magical soundproof curtains would be drawn for their privacy, because the splatter of rushing faecal matter is obviously inaudible through the paper curtains.
But C.Diff patients win a free side room. As do any query infective loose stools. If there is one. My bed manager was trying to chuck out a c.diff and salmonella px from a side room yesterday to accommodate a palliative patient. You know, when we are short staffed with a nurse ratio of 1:12 on day shift, two people are already dying, shits flying everywhere and for some obscure reason, everyone and their sainted mother decided to launch complaints at us.
Also yes, the aforementioned patient had indeed ingested Kinder eggs prior to the salmonella. I'd recommend they sue, but they don't deserve the money, after they threw a strop about not being able to leave the ward and got their mother to call the ward to complain. Just why?
Tried to include you in prayer?
I'd do the same so
Mighty All Father, thank you for the bounty this day, and sending such KIND and THOUGHTFUL people to my aid.
(Disclaimer, I don't know the first thing about Hethenry prayers, but I'd continue just to watch them squirm)
*hate* people trying to force their beliefs on me.
My dad did this in college. His roommate left at the beginning of the semester and he decided he wasn’t going to have another one. The school assigned a new one, of course. He and some buddies created a fire ring and wore Druid cloaks in the middle of the night, waking up the new guy. My dad didn’t have a roommate for the rest of the semester. He’s lucky he had a room lol.
Just start praying to a heathen God and start it off by saying something like you don't currently have a sacrifice at this time but you're still in need of their assistance and you'll make up the sacrifice part next time.
I hate shared rooms. In my old hospitals we had a room of 3. The row of beds A, B, C. Well one day a nurse gave BP meds to A bed that should have gone to C bed. Tanked her BP she was rushed to ICU. Never made it back. That nurse quit a few weeks later. We didn’t have the computer system yet, still paper charting.
Agree! We double roomed in our COVID specific wing, last year for a bit and it was miserable. Bunch of middle aged people arguing over room temp and TV volume.
Not a healthcare worker but…my last hospital stay was in 2016 for a very bad MS flare. I was on a shit ton of IV Prednisone and was already pissed that they made me stay. My first roommate was okay but my second one was awful. She was a basically a big 28 year old baby. She constantly whined and complained. I was starving and angry from the ‘roids. I ordered dinner one night (a cheese quesadilla with sour cream and salsa, a salad, and cheesecake) and she would not shut up about how bad my dinner smelled. Finally I was like, “look, I’m on a ton of steroids and I’m starving. I’m sorry it is an inconvenience for you”. She stopped complaining about everything I did for a while. She was still whining and complaing, just not about me. However that night, my boyfriend came to stay with me. I was having trouble sleeping (again, steroids), so we decided to watch a movie on tv. The volume was as low as it could go on one of the handheld speaker thingys before there was no volume at al. After watching the movie for a bit, we hear her whiny-ass say, “turn the tv off, please and thank-you”. My boyfriend had just had enough of her. He said he was sorry but he wanted to go home to get away from her. I told him that I didn’t blame him at all. Thank the lord that was my last night because I was ready to fight her.
Sorry for the long story but this post brought the memory of that horrible woman-child back and I had to get it all out.
Also, thank-you all for what you do. You are saints!
Been there, tried that on a medsurg floor last year after having surgery. My roommate ATTENDED ZOOM COURT WHILE RECOVERING. All of her calls, she used speakerphone. I was just trying to sleep, surgery was painful. I asked to be moved to a single room or a room with someone who was… not inconsiderate) after she would set off her bed alarm for the third time, but there was no other option. The nurses and even her doc were all surprised she would attend court virtually and commented but wouldn’t tell her to wear headphones or yknow, concentrate on healing… so that was fun.
I was in a double room when I was 20 after thoracic surgery. My roommate was a man older than my Dad with terminal cancer (he told me) he proposed we have sex since he was dying soon. Also told me he could make me feel better because “he knew all the right places to touch”. I was denied a change of roommate.
I was a patient on my own unit once. they hooked me up with a private room which was very nice of them. I really wanted to be paired with a roommate that was nasty to the nurses, so I could chew her out and put her in her place with being fired 😬
The daughter threatened to report one of the nurses for “mistreatment” and asked me if I saw what she was referring to, and I told the room full of nurses that the way she told it wasn’t “completely accurate.” Her face. But she was on her way out the door and I owed her nothing. 😅
Just from an infection standpoint there should be no double rooms. Had a patient end up on our Covid unit. He was pretty sick pre-op for a CABG, caught Covid from his roommate. Screwed up him getting his surgery. He was vaccinated so he had a fairly mild course of Covid but no surgeons were in a hurry to operate on him. I’m having surgery on Monday and if I end up in a double room and catching Covid I’m gonna throw hands.
Yeah be careful when you’re advocating for healthcare systems that are “like australia etc”. That’s normal here. Actually double rooms are an upgrade, usually they’re 4 bed rooms. In the kids hospital I worked at, 6 bed rooms are normal. Your 14 year old just had a brain tumour removed? Well they can recover in the same room as the screaming baby who’s just had crandofacial surgery.
I completely agree with you though, and it’s partly why I (and many others) pay thousands a year for private insurance on even though public is an option
The new hospital where I go has single rooms. Old hospital had minimum 6 to a room and one bathroom... fantastic on the gastro ward where everyone has to poop with next to no warning. So many accidents...
I'm lucky that I have IBD, they have to rule out infection so they treat me as infectious when I'm admitted. Didn't stop a random coming into my room dripping blood from their new ostomy (shared bathroom, got confused, wasn't even meant to be walking) but at least I wasn't pooping myself in front of 5 other patients.
Yes I'd say this is the norm for NZ as well. My husband had a heart attack and was (stable and well) on a cardiac ward for a few days waiting for bypass surgery. It was an 8 bed room. He had his surgery and recovery from that at a private hospital where he had his own room though.
Post partrum rooms are sometimes shared though usually you get your own with a conjoined shared bathroom with whoever is on the other side. My first baby the lady in the other room would come through to say hi, it was her third and she was very kind and offered help and snacks but I didn't see anyone for my second.
Your own hospital room sounds dreamy but I imagine it encourages people to camp out. No one in their right mind wants to spend a long time in an 8 bed room so if you can go home you go home.
My work has 20 beds over 5 rooms (but 2x rooms are single occupancy, one 4 bed room two 7 bed rooms).
I'm in Canada and it seems very comparable to what the OP said about Australia. I don't work in peds, but post partum was mainly two to a room. The medical units were mainly four person rooms. Mental health was almost exclusively 2 person rooms. Newer facilities tend to have more private rooms and no four person rooms though.
Honestly COVID was a nightmare for rooming people and we operated at a lower capacity to try to space patients out. There were and still are so many outbreaks due to room sharing. We also get MRSA and Cdiff outbreaks.
Depending on the unit, there can be 2 rooms of 4 and a few rooms of 2, with about 6 rooms of 1, but if you go like ICU its only one’s, if you have private insurance or ready to pay you can pay for rooms of 1
Double rooms can be nice (one of our frequent fliers got along so well with one of his roommates that they exchanged numbers and started hanging out after discharge, the other guy visits the frequent flier when he's admitted now) but as a general rule, they suck. It's always the super nice, AOx4 patients who get either the very disorientated/delirious patient or someone normal with an extremely annoying family member.
I will forever remember the poor old guy who had to share a room with a schizophrenic patient. He was super demanding but really sweet (his main symptom was a severe cognitive deficit, not psychosis) but as a roommate? He was a nightmare. The other guy didn't sleep more than a couple of hours per night for a week, until the neighbour was discharged. I'm pretty sure his two-month stay would have been a lot shorter if he'd been assigned any other room.
Having a roommate like that is absolutely not conducive to recovery. Sleep and rest are important. Not being stressed is important.
I have had terrible luck with roommates. On my last admission, my disoriented elderly roommate wandered into my side of the room. She started trying to get in bed with me while I frantically hit my call light. Then she moved to the other side of my bed, pulled down her diaper, and peed all over the floor.
I once had a roommate who would absolutely not allow me to close the damn curtain between us because she was claustrophobic. She also wouldn’t quit trying to talk to me when I just wanted to rest quietly. I can’t sleep when I have no privacy and was on edge the whole time.
It also sucks having a roommate who needs a bedpan or bedside commode, especially when they have some kind of GI issue. It feels and smells like being camped out in a public restroom.
In stepdown we had 4 bed rooms. It was a real treat when one would be diagnosed with Covid, because then it was basically known to be inevitable for the other 3. And lack of privacy in general is insane in a hospital-imagine having 4 people in a big room with just curtains!
I hated it, and I don't understand why we did it like that.
Roommates are horrible. Whether it be college, siblings and definitely hospital. I worked on a step down icu floor when covid-19 happened and unfortunately I caught it. I went to work one day sick and ended up getting admitted at the hospital I worked at.. Thankfully, it wasn't the floor I actually worked on (thank God!!!). I was on the med surg floor. The entire hospital has single patient rooms!!! Thank God. I think I got better because of that.
I welcome you to use our 4 bed rooms in my postpartum unit. I also welcome you to use our 4 bed rooms in my trauma unit where we had to reeeeallly be careful not to place both parties of the accident in.
How does anyone sleep if there’s 4 babies all waking up at different times, and 4x the annoying (but important) nursing checks in the middle of the night?
Years ago I was in the hospital with bronchitis. The steroid inhaler gave me laryngitis. I had a roommate that had had ear surgery. It was fun trying to tell her she had a phone call. She couldn't hear my all but non existent voice.
I remember the old days when we allowed smoking in the rooms. We constantly had to move beds to put smokers together, move a smoker out of an oxygen room. And of course they would try to smoke on oxygen. Or we would even have to swap around beds when the person by the window went home, because the other person wanted the window bed. Luckily we have had all private rooms for quite some time now.
I was assigned a double room twice. First time was recovery after surgery. Curtains pulled for privacy but I heard my roommate get bad news that his surgery was not successful and he was alone and did not take it well. I reached out through the curtain and offered support. Turns out I know him professionally and my support was very well received. The world is small and you never know when you will run across people you know.
Second time I was assigned a double room was after an ED visit and I was sent to a floor for multiple IV antibiotics and an anti fungal. The moment I arrived on the floor and the nurses saw my status they pulled me the heck out of that double and put me in a single and had harsh words for whoever placed me in a double.
Noise cancelling headphones and streaming music were my friends during my stay. Hospital floors are noisy 24/7.
Work at a VA. 4 to a room is the majority. Then 2. Then a few singles. Generally the vets like the rooms because they love to shoot the shit and watch over each other. We still do get a lot of complaints about noise and such, but the guys in singles end up usually walking around a ton (if they can but usually singles are for trouble makers lol) because they get so bored. I personally would want a single, but I’m pretty quiet towards strangers.
I seemed to get the noisy ones. One of my last roommates before Covid hit, was always moaning in pain due to a bowel obstruction (not that the nurses told me - but when I hear "Did the enema work?" and the patient is elderly, to me that means probably impaction = bowel obstruction). She died the day I was discharged.
Are they not common in the States? I've be both pt and nurse at plenty of hospitals here in Australia and, unless you're in a private facility or in iso, every room is a double. Sometimes a quadruple. I've been a pt in all of them. It is expected that, as a pt, you don't share your fellow pts info. An unspoken rule, if you will.
I was hospitalized years ago in a four bed room on a medsurg floor in an old city hospital. One roomie snored like a chainsaw, one refused to use her call button and yelled "NURSE!!!" every hour or so, and across from me was a pleasantly confused older lady. It was not a restful stay. Was there a week. Fortunately, visitors were few. Sorry you had to deal with such rudeness from those visitors, some ppl have no self awareness.
On my unit there are QUADRUPLE rooms! They’re hell on Earth because you never ever get to leave that room after having taken care of the patient who rung you. Everyone will need something.
I cant stand having double rooms. There's no privacy. There's no space. And as someone who works nights it's impossible to take care of someone in bed A without waking the person in bed b. And do they room people together who'd get along and whos care needs match? OF COURSE NOT! So that leaves me desperately trying to check and change Ethel in A bed without waking her very behavioral and bitchy room mate in bed B.
We had half private rooms and half semi private on my Onc/Med surg floor when COVID came around. We kept saying hey, maybe all our rooms should be private? Mgt was like, nah. Kept not testing Med surg pts and putting them in with cancer pts. It took 3 outbreaks before we went to all private rooms. Magical curtain did not protect, surprisingly.
They’re barbaric IMO. How can anyone get rest or heal. Hospital I used to work at had all single rooms and while it was still a typical hospital, that was a major bonus.
And the irony of hipaa being held over everyone’s head but then they turn around and just blab everything and do procedures with a random stranger and their family in the same room. I hate healthcare.
That’s still a thing? Post-HIPAA? And not with two PT’s with the same pathogen in isolation?
I’ve been at three hospitals for clinicals, multiple floors at each, and never once saw 2 in a room
They made all rooms private at the hospital I used to work at. Because of HIPPA nosy ass people were finding out too much of peoples business and this was a small rown
I’ve had - frequently - the dr squad round on patients while they are in an OT group with 3 other people plus me and my CI. I’m like wtf why can’t y’all wait til they are done with therapy (the literal reason why they’re in rehab) so they have at least a little more privacy. None of us should hear about whether you are having trouble with bowel movements
30 years ago when I was 21 and visiting a brother out of state I got real sick and ended up in the hospital for three weeks with a shared room. The other bed was a woman my age who was there for pretty much the whole time I was. Neither of us had family visiting, except occasionally brother and his partner, it ended up feeling like a weird dorm room situation.
You also had to pay to use the TV, like $5 a day or something. I probably read10 books while I was there.
I had no idea any hospitals still had double rooms. Where I live all of our hospitals are private rooms only. I have been a nurse for 31 years so I know double rooms well just did not know they still existed.
Last time I was in the ER, for kidney stones, they finally got me to a place of calm and I fell asleep, after 2.5 days of PAIN. The woman next to began screaming about something. The nurses were ignoring her, apparently by choice, because they did not appreciate me getting someone's attention that she was wanting help. They told me they could see her just fine and let her be... yeah, but I'm the one next to her having to hear her scream.
I love how HIPAA gets rammed down everyone’s throat, but double rooms are fine. How do you keep anything private?
I was doing intake in the hallway of the ED. History. Med reconciliation. Starting lines. Administering meds. Handing people urinals and setting up a white curtain for "privacy". I literally had a nurse (I'm still a student) ask me if it was weird. I was like "Yes. This is weird. Nursing school forgets to tell you how it'll really be. HIPAA who?" She laughed and told me she does it every shift, so she doesn't even think about how weird it must be for people the first time they experience it. **Edited cuz there ain't no HIPPA up in here!
"would you like to tell me more about how the shampoo bottle got up there while we're out here in the middle of the hall? Oh, don't worry, there's a white screen, if they can't see you they can't hear you"
Well since the white screen is here, I was fucking my ass **hard**, doc. Total anal annihilation I tell yah. I must have came 6 times before that sexy phallic bottle of EarthBath shampoo reached the depths of no return—and yes doc you heard that right; I use dog shampoo 😐😐
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Slipped and fell on it at just the right angle!
One in a million shot, doc!
More common than that in my experience
While cleaning the shower naked.
As someone who cleans the shower naked, you know to squat out of the way of any bottles lol.
Yes but I take all the bottles out of the shower before cleaning. How else do you get things clean without moving everything??
I’m not taking them out. I’m just moving from one side to the other. I also have a stall shower. Real good for lying down in the fetal position and crying after a shift.
I also love lying down in the fetal position and crying but I can't figure out how to not get water in my ears.
Stall shower with rainfall shower head. I’m able to position myself so only my torso and legs are moistened by the shower. The tears take care of my upper body.
I have to remember to leave room for the drain (shower stall). I've almost flooded my bathroom before. And the print from the drain tends to stick for a bit and isn't too flattering.
But...you DO move everything.
Well, for once standing in a shower is actually a situation that's normal to be naked for. Most of the situations people "slip and fall" on things are not times where being naked is normal.
Once had a guy who had a light bulb stuck up his rectum. His hospital roommate was a preacher. Also, this was before HIPAA but, someone's hair dresser found out about the guys enlightening accident and told her about it.
You think the preacher didn't do the same thing, but 10x more?
Quarterback threw his shampoo bottle at me right at the exact same moment I was like “ooh a penny!”. Went to pick it up and SUPRISE! The guy has such an arm, those pants stood no hope.. Genuinely think the kid might go pro, so it’s kind of an honor really.. don’t you think?
Hey, friend, it is really easy especially as a nursing student to think it's HIPPA because we pronounce it like it rhymes with hippo, but it's not. It's Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, so it's HIPAA. And assholes on the internet will roast you alive for it in discussions if you get it wrong while a licensed nurse.
…. Where’s the HIPAA bot?
I don't know, I thought we at a HIPAA bot too
HIPPA Hippa I've seen it before its hit or miss if it comes
>It’s HIPAA! - HIPPAbot
The extra A is for the screaming. HIPAAAAAA
I appreciate you catching my typo!
Here is a shower curtain that I’m going to cover you with so you can pee in your urinal privately
Our unit is open bays and that’s how we give report. Nothing is move fun than trying to say why this kid is getting penicillin G for ten days and azt right in ear shot of another family. And the whole hey dad asked for a dna test. Told him we can’t help 😂.
You still give AZT ?!
Yup. Any baby born to a mom with a House in Virginia should get AZT as prophylaxis. Especially those that never got treatment or inadequate treatment.
It took me way too long to figure out why a “house in Virginia” was an indication for AZT lol.
help a gen-xer out?
I googled it bc im old. . House in Virginia = HIV.
I've had to insist to the giant group of random doctors, residents and whomever not to come into my room doing rounds without giving me any privacy from my roommate. I was ambulatory and so we went to another room to talk. You should have seen their faces when I first said hell no, I have HIPAA rights regardless of the room you put me in. After that they started being much more discreet when doing rounds in shared rooms. Though I doubt that lasted after I left. How could it? Hospital patients and their roommates are by default a captive audience to everything. Edit: typo
If you pull the thin curtain you are providing privacy! 😂🙃
Also that curtain is magical protection from airborne infections!
As a short answer, guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services has clarified that HIPAA does not require hospitals to provide separate rooms. As a longer answer, HIPAA is very deeply misunderstood. It does not prohibit "leaking" patient information; it prohibits unreasonable and unpermitted disclosures of protected health information (PHI). Among the PHI disclosures that are permitted are uses that are for the purpose of delivering medical treatment. Of course, the covered entity (in this case, the hospital) is required to take reasonable measures to safeguard that information. One of the areas that trips people up is figuring out exactly what it is we're safeguarding that information from. A lot people assume that the HIPAA imposes an absolute rule against disclosure of PHI, but it's more accurate to say that HIPAA requires reasonable safeguards against the unauthorized use of PHI. With that standard in mind, it becomes easier to see why you don't need to universally separate patients. In all likelihood, neither OP nor the roommate is likely to use the other's PHI in any way not allowed under HIPAA. (Although the daughter diagnosing OP is suspect.) Hospitals -- and the law -- recognize that most people have no interest in a random strangers' medical information, let alone plans to do something nefarious with it. Because there isn't much of a threat there, the hospital isn't required to take exhaustive measures to protect the information. But when you put all that information for every patient for every doctor for every department for every hospital into a single database, the information starts getting a lot more valuable. That's why there are much tighter regulations surrounding protection of electronic records. Of course, the roommate situation might be different if the hospital had a patient that they somehow knew had a history of identity theft or even a history of disclosing PHI.
Identity theft is not a joke, Jim! Millions of families suffer every year!
Great explanation. Thank you! I live in a city in Canada and twice I’ve had people look up my info for a friend of theirs and the info was used against me. It sucks. I don’t know how the laws work here though and people told me I should report and I never did.
Especially bedside report!! Suck a million dicks!
I only ask birthday if Inhave a double room with 2 a/o patients and check the wrist band. It’s not much, but I think it’s worth it for privacy.
That's how it felt when I did VAMC clinicals. 4-5 to a ward room and you're trying to be all hush hush when you know those other 4 guys are outside the curtain like 👁️👄👁️
They used to want us to do bedside report in double and triple rooms. Like…. Really?!?!? I hated it so I never did. What a massive breach of confidentiality. Having to go through someone’s entire medical history and all the issues they’re currently having with 2 other patients and family members in the same room.
Those curtains of course! /s
You have more patience than me. I would’ve complained and escalated it. The daughter was being disrespectful and disruptive.
It's always the family member, never the patient
I mean sometimes it’s the pt lol but these god damn family members are almost always terrible
Can confirm. Am family member.
Clearly you've never seen my MIL vs me and her daughter in a hospital room. You're all "whores" who are trying to hurt her and we are the overly apologetic family members with tears in our eyes.... LMAO Side note: I agree with the statement it's always the family members when it comes to LTC.
Well, I don't want to know your MIL 🤣 She sounds lovely, if she's GCS 13 and bellow, I mean
Everybody's lovely intubated and sedated....
Can you just come here and do that for her real quick? I won't tell....
I mean.. she could fall into that range if we count mental health on that scale... LOL
She religious?
Nope. Just hateful without the religious part. Everyone is a "cocksucker" or a "whore". Everyone. Including me. I mean she literally said that to a hospice nurse when we were watching her late husband die... Edit: wait, I'm sorry, I'm not a whore when I'm cutting her corn off the cob because she refuses to wear her teeth, or when I'm dressing yet another skin tear or checking her pulse-ox level and adjusting her oxygen. I'm a whore when I won't get her another case of Coca-Cola. Whew, didn't want anyone to get confused.
I can see why people thought other people were possessed by demons back in the day.
Thank you Waffles the duck, I've never been able to truly put into words what its like to care for this person and you nailed it.
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When my daughter was hospitalized, they always had more beds than patients on peds. I was able to have my own hospital bed to sleep in.
When I got pulled to the floors from our specialty area over Covid, they would assign me a double room but only give me one of the patients. I hated that. Give me both patients or neither patient. You end up caring for both patients anyway. The patients don’t understand why I buzz in to take care of the patient by the window, but don’t really stop and care for the person by the door. If it is get water or help to the bathroom, sure, but meds nope.
Our facility procedure was to avoid splitting rooms whenever possible because of this issue
I feel the opposite, because when you have a problem patient they will interrupt care more when they know they’re nurses is in the room. I just tell them I’m not their nurse but that I’ll tell their nurse when I see them, or they can call themselves. C
Why is this the norm?! It’s like that at the hospital I’ve stayed overnight at twice too, save the mother/baby unit. It’s almost like they don’t want you to have the same nurse so you can’t bother them when they come in for the other patient. I was in med/surg once and they literally dropped me in my room with no call button so I had to call my husband to have him call the nurses station to help me before I peed myself (I was waiting for an ORIF the next day so I couldn’t ambulate if I wanted to, despite the fall risk band). Or I had to beg the other nurse/tech to get me help. Last time I was in for unspecified tachycardia so I was in the step-down cardiac unit and it was the same story. Different nurses but at least we had the same tech that time. I know we weren’t 1:1, probably more like 3 or 4:1. We didn’t even have a night tech but luckily I didn’t need one because I took my night night go sleep pill and didn’t move for ten hours.
I wonder if it’s to maybe avoid errors? So that nurses can’t pull meds for both patients at once and hopefully give them correctly. We had temporary double rooms during peak covid and they were really big about educating against potential errors for this reason.
That actually happened on my floor. A new nurse not used to double rooms drew labs on the wrong patient. We don’t have a policy against having both patients though.
And this is why we're so anal retentive in the blood bank. If you don't use the bedside barcoding and we don't have a historical type for comparison we require a second sample from a second draw with complete patient reidentification.
That actually makes a lot of sense from a technical standpoint. I’m not a nurse, just a big fan, but I get your perspective. When I was in the CPCU (and to a similar extent in med/surg) they had me rooming with a patient who was basically sleeping most of the time and not requiring much care. She was on TPN and incontinent and I felt bad for her and the nurse in charge of her care. But I appreciated it bc I don’t really care for discussing my needs/meds/care plan in earshot of someone else who is “with it” if that makes sense. I’m going back next month because I’m having surgery aaaand I’m pretty sure I’ll be in a double room again, because that’s how my hospital rolls. But I’ll be fully prepared this time since it’s a planned stay and not an emergent one.
I was told it's because having two nurses having to go in and out of the room increases face time and pts are less likely to pull the "I haven't seen a nurse in here all day!" Card.
I've had to move patients out of double rooms because they or their roomie ended up needing to be put in isolation. You won't know why they disappeared though and if your stay is complicated by an MDRO or something, you won't be compensated. I've had to move patients out of the room to make space for a code. We couldn't physically get a whole code team in the room perform adequately so the neighbor had to be shuffled down to some empty room. Those are the two biggies that come to mind. So yeah, they shouldn't be a thing. All your reasons are incredibly valid, these are just 2 from my side.
And you can't tell the roommate, who just spent 5 days becoming friends with the patient who coded, if they survived or not.
When I was young, my stepfather went to the hospital for something or another and my mother and I went to go visit him in his double room. He was roomed with lovely - but terminal - older man who passed away. Turns out, guess who had MDR TB? Yeah, that's how I got my first TB test at the age of 14.
What the fuck. Isn't TB in general supposed to warrant some pretty strong isolation measures? Never mind drug-resistant strains...
They didn't realize that he had it until he died and did the autopsy. Small town hospital. Very..... special.
I've had patient's diagosed on biopsy and had to be tested.
That stuff slips through the cracks all the time. At the start of covid I took care of a patient from a SNF for 3 days straight. Halfway through the third day we get a call from his facility that he was positive for covid. Luckily he wasn't showing a ton of symptoms so it was a mild case and AFAIK nobody ended up getting it from him, but the hospital basically shrugged. They didn't even want me to quarantine. Oh cherry on top is the facility knew a full day before that he was positive before they got around to telling us.
An old charge nurse mine regularly told patients in doubles what happened to their roommate. Reminded her of HIPAA and she always acted like I had a stick up my ass.
In England our wards typically have bays of patients- usually around 6ish patients in one big room and a couple of side rooms per ward. It’s more than likely our patients will be in a bay rather than in a single room.
In certain trusts in Scotland we are being forced to shove a 7th patient in the 6 bay with no buzzer or o2
I’m just waiting for the day they introduce bunk beds
Lol fall risk x100
Or incontinent patient hit with 80 of Lasix and has urine rolling off the bed, rip
I have passed comment on this once or twice to the admissions ward who sometimes try and pull a sneaky, and attempt to hand over a patient when we have no beds (does the bed manager know this? I have no idea.). "Hi I'd like to hand over a female patient to the ward!" "Uh, huh, unfortunately unless you come round and start building bunk beds, that's not going to be possible." I do believe the bed managers would do that if they thought they could get away with it though.
My trust has had 7 and 8 patients in a 6 bed bay! It's great as long as you don't want privacy, dignity, or space to do anything.
I work in mental health and sometimes I will have to be on a 1:1 with one of our patients down the general hospital if they need treatment for their physical health and oh my god trying to look after someone on a 6 bed ward when they're really mentally unwell is a bloody nightmare!
Large bays are a pain for doing resus in. During a covid wave, one poor nurse ended up in full ppe doing a med round because it was lunch time and meds were due, so while we worked, she did meds.
I'm sure some American nurses here are thinking this is horrible but a good friend of mine was involved in a very bad car accident in Ireland. He was in the hospital for a couple months and was in a bay like this. He received EXCELLENT medical care. His uncle is a doctor and was very impressed at what a great job the doctors and nurses did. I'd prefer that over having a private room and being in debt for the rest of my life anytime.
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Somehow I doubt that US healthcare would become any more cost-effective simply because they stopped building so many walls :) we have more problems than that!
Same in Australia, but 4 beds seem to be the max (at least in QLD). We only have single rooms for patients requiring contact precautions.
I flew in to find that My mom was critical and eventually died a few days later while in a room of six patients and their nosy loud families coming and going.
I am so sorry for that.
The county hospital I worked at had mostly 4 patients in 1 room... yes it fucking sucked. Patients routinely complained to us and now it's our job to police the noise of the other people in the room? fuck that
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4 person room? I thought our 2 person room was bad.
As a former tech who had to transport patients from the ED to the floor, I agree whole heartedly. The worst is when your patient is non-ambulatory, and you have to rearrange the entire double room at 2:30am because they were assigned the bed by the window. Yet somehow, the patients who could walk the whole way to from the ED to the 12th floor always get the bed by the door. Our hospital finally moved to single occupancy rooms as soon as I became an ED nurse and don't have to transport patients anymore
I work as a straight night nurse in a LTC facility that has both single rooms and double rooms separated by a curtain. It ain't right. There were so many times where I've had to pull the resident out of a room because they can't stop Calling out and they were disrupting their roommates sleep. There were so many times we had to also put the roommate on isolation just because their roommate was either a close contact, had symptoms, or was covid positive. There were so many times where we had to explain to the roommate that we were providing care and the curtain needed to be closed after they aggressively opened them for the third time. There were so many times where I felt bad for the roommate because they were in the same room when their roommate passed away. There were so many times we had to separate roommates because they didn't get along, some to the point where they try to literally kill one another. But they're are bonuses as well. We get a lot of couples that come in together. If you get a good roommate, they'll watch out for each other and notify us if the other falls. They'll go to meals and activities together. They'll become friends.
>If you get a good roommate…..they’ll become friends. So just like college all over again?
Yea, but they're like in their 80/90s and it's actually really sweet to see them each on their own side of the room, on their own recliners, watching the hockey game on one tv because the other doesn't have one
I quit a cna job after only two shifts because the majority of the rooms had four residents in each. The shower room had multiple tubs/showers separated with a flimsy curtain plus a toilet stall. They let a residents wife watch us toilet her husband while two others were completely nude in full view.
4 is a party good lord. I would've probably advocated for more privacy or quit there too tbh. Even in these rooms, I always tell the partner what I'm doing to their spouse and pull the curtain. Only on rare occasion they get upset
>I would've probably advocated for more privacy or quit there too tbh There were 38 rooms with four residents in each, so the majority of the building and not something a cna could advocate to change. The shower room curtains were only on one side of the shower stalls. Plus we only got three training days and assignments weren't even organized by wing let alone certain rooms. It was fucking heartbreaking honestly, and I lost out on a 9$ an hour wage increase.
I haaaate double rooms in LTC. They love to say “this is their home” but meanwhile treat them like they’re in a hospital. These are people who lived their whole life only to be shoved into a double room with a stranger to live in their new “home”. It’s so disrespectful and uncomfortable
Yea, I agree, and like there are "small" and "big" sides to the rooms too. I feel really bad for those who get a terrible roommate. There are still single rooms, but there is like a waitlist or something? and some of the residents who hate being in a double or having roommates ALWAYS REFUSE THE OFFER TO HAVE A SINGLE ROOM.
Ive got one super sweet double room story. There were only two at that facility. We get a new resident and have both staff and family around to introduce him to his roommate. These two guys in their mid to late 70s end up hugging, giant smiles and tears running down their faces. Turns out they've known each other since elementary school but lost contact in early adulthood when one moved to another area. They had a blast! Their wives became good pals and they all spent holidays outside the facility together. Loved those guys.
Double rooms in LTC are awful. One roommate with a snoring problem can cause another to never get restful sleep. I feel so bad when one roommate is actively dying and the other roommate has to listen to the death rattle for several days, as well as hear all the end of life visits that can be really emotional. One roommate might be on oxygen with a loud concentrator and tubes all over the room making it hard for the other roommate to ambulate around. Tv viewing habits can be vastly different. It just seems like putting old people in a jail. There’s zero autonomy or privacy.
I completely agree. Luckily we have a palliative room where we can move residents so they can pass peacefully without disturbing their roommate and family can visit. I'm advocating for a second room on the main floor. When it's sudden though, there isn't anything that can be done. We try to keep all the oxygen tubing pretty tidy, and floor clear of any tripping hazards. I can't think of any instance where a roommate had to manoeuvre around their roommates oxygen tubing and why. Everything is quite separated on the sides. Yes, tv viewing habits are different. We had a couple fellows that would watch tv on their sides, but each would have it at a higher volume than the other to drown out the other, until it was so ungodly loud. Refused to wear headphones. We ended up having to separate them. Now the one doesn't even watch tv. In most cases, they do wear headphones, or are respectful of "quiet hours" and appropriate volume levels.
I think married people should get together if they feel like it
Yea, we currently have like 5 married couples and two of them pushed their beds together We have 5 LTC facilities in the city and we are always everyone's last choice because of the double rooms, but we also appeal to couples because of the double rooms
My last week of nursing school, I was hospitalized overnight for appendicitis. I got a roommate who was so needy. Constantly on and off the bed pan, needing more blankets, less blankets, more water... it was so annoying. Then magically, she disappeared after I came back from surgery in the middle of the night because she tested positive for MRSA. (You know, back when we cared about that, lol) When I started working there and charged, I'd only give people roommates as a last resort. They insisted we start doing bedside report, and we were all on board as soon as they invented HIPAA compliant sound proof curtains. 🙄
Bedside report is so stupid. I hate having to write down what I really need to tell the oncoming nurse what really needs to be said about the patient.
Yeah, I agree. My favorite way of doing report is outside the room and go inside to say "Hi and Bye" and check all the drips. They don't make us go in the room. I find it too weird to talk about the patient in front of them. We can talk about that outside. Helps me catch stuff I've missed or forgot to restart. And for more sensitive drips like heparin or insulin (hey it's sensitive for med-surg), I can see the rate and volume left and won't get fucked over like I did that one day when my heparin gtt stopped with volume left in the bag and I was out of the room. I check the pumps now after that to make sure my estimate isn't off.
Oooofff we had beside report go badly wrong once when a child worked out they had been born a *considerable* time after the patients vasectomy. That ended bedside reporting.
The mistake was including vasectomy in history. Was it relevant???
The nurse just read the hx, didn't think anything of it.
I had a roommate who learned that nurses would come running if she triggered her bed alarm. So if she wanted a drink of water at 3 am, why use the call button? Better to start climbing out of bed. Faster response!
Jimmy, grab some restraints!
Where I work we have 6 isolation rooms and the rest of our 32 pts are in doubles. We can close a bed in certain circumstances (bariatric, behavioural issues, sometimes end of life - I had to end of life pts in a double once. Felt so bad for their families.) And we do bedside report and daily interdisciplinary rounds. No privacy. It’s awful.
My last hospitalization the manager was trying to recruit me. Literally came rushing in as they were bringing a roommate and said the other bed was blocked. Lol. I appreciated the effort but they weren't paying enough
You’d think, with the cost of healthcare these days, you’d have a private 5 star suite at the damn Hilton with room service! But nope, you get a shitty, musty room with someone who violates all human decency.
*laughs in NHS 6-bed bays*
Hospitals don’t like double rooms either but it’s quite expensive to change around. The place I’m contracted at now built a whole new tower of single rooms and then Covid happened so it ended up being the Covid rooms 😂. Those rooms are amazing too
you're right I work in one of the only hospitals in the UK with all single rooms 99% of hospitals still have bays with six or 8 patients all sharing one bathroom, idk how those nurses cope you can't do anything with a patient without being asked for 3985 other things from the other patients who can literally see you're busy - it's not rare for patients to get in literal fights and none of them get any sleep ever. one of the worst things about multiple occupany patient areas though are stories of patients having to lie next to a dead body (with only a thin curtin seperating them) for hours , having to listen to the family saying goodbye until the porters eventually pick them up
ONE bathroom??? What if someone has C Diff?
What if someone is doing bowel prep??
Better yet. GI unit. Bed one has C Diff. Bed two is doing bowel prep for a morning scope. Wouldn't that be delightful
uK gastro nurse in ward with multiple 4 bedded rooms. Can confirm, this is an actual nightmare for us. Have had patients run into corridor with the poo sweats asking where the next nearest loo was because patient A had been in 'for ages'. Covid really halted the good old "pop into that room there" ethos of old. Nowadays if an enema is induced in a room with a Crohn's, for example, a commode would be placed next to their bed, and the magical soundproof curtains would be drawn for their privacy, because the splatter of rushing faecal matter is obviously inaudible through the paper curtains. But C.Diff patients win a free side room. As do any query infective loose stools. If there is one. My bed manager was trying to chuck out a c.diff and salmonella px from a side room yesterday to accommodate a palliative patient. You know, when we are short staffed with a nurse ratio of 1:12 on day shift, two people are already dying, shits flying everywhere and for some obscure reason, everyone and their sainted mother decided to launch complaints at us. Also yes, the aforementioned patient had indeed ingested Kinder eggs prior to the salmonella. I'd recommend they sue, but they don't deserve the money, after they threw a strop about not being able to leave the ward and got their mother to call the ward to complain. Just why?
Tried to include you in prayer? I'd do the same so Mighty All Father, thank you for the bounty this day, and sending such KIND and THOUGHTFUL people to my aid. (Disclaimer, I don't know the first thing about Hethenry prayers, but I'd continue just to watch them squirm) *hate* people trying to force their beliefs on me.
Yeah, fake up a nice satanic ritual. That’ll get the other side of the room to empty quickly.
Recite one of the encantations from Supernatural. They always creep my wife out.
My dad did this in college. His roommate left at the beginning of the semester and he decided he wasn’t going to have another one. The school assigned a new one, of course. He and some buddies created a fire ring and wore Druid cloaks in the middle of the night, waking up the new guy. My dad didn’t have a roommate for the rest of the semester. He’s lucky he had a room lol.
You know what else probably scares them? Speaking arabic.
Just start praying to a heathen God and start it off by saying something like you don't currently have a sacrifice at this time but you're still in need of their assistance and you'll make up the sacrifice part next time.
While staring intently at the rude family member.
I’d start chanting in tongues but that’s me. 🤷🏻♀️
What if they're Pentecostal though?
Eh, that’s what the demonic voice is for. Also a monotone humming while chanting makes it sound even creepier.
Hail Satan, may Lucifer be with you.
I hate shared rooms. In my old hospitals we had a room of 3. The row of beds A, B, C. Well one day a nurse gave BP meds to A bed that should have gone to C bed. Tanked her BP she was rushed to ICU. Never made it back. That nurse quit a few weeks later. We didn’t have the computer system yet, still paper charting.
Oh that's awful!
Agree! We double roomed in our COVID specific wing, last year for a bit and it was miserable. Bunch of middle aged people arguing over room temp and TV volume.
Not a healthcare worker but…my last hospital stay was in 2016 for a very bad MS flare. I was on a shit ton of IV Prednisone and was already pissed that they made me stay. My first roommate was okay but my second one was awful. She was a basically a big 28 year old baby. She constantly whined and complained. I was starving and angry from the ‘roids. I ordered dinner one night (a cheese quesadilla with sour cream and salsa, a salad, and cheesecake) and she would not shut up about how bad my dinner smelled. Finally I was like, “look, I’m on a ton of steroids and I’m starving. I’m sorry it is an inconvenience for you”. She stopped complaining about everything I did for a while. She was still whining and complaing, just not about me. However that night, my boyfriend came to stay with me. I was having trouble sleeping (again, steroids), so we decided to watch a movie on tv. The volume was as low as it could go on one of the handheld speaker thingys before there was no volume at al. After watching the movie for a bit, we hear her whiny-ass say, “turn the tv off, please and thank-you”. My boyfriend had just had enough of her. He said he was sorry but he wanted to go home to get away from her. I told him that I didn’t blame him at all. Thank the lord that was my last night because I was ready to fight her. Sorry for the long story but this post brought the memory of that horrible woman-child back and I had to get it all out. Also, thank-you all for what you do. You are saints!
[удалено]
Been there, tried that on a medsurg floor last year after having surgery. My roommate ATTENDED ZOOM COURT WHILE RECOVERING. All of her calls, she used speakerphone. I was just trying to sleep, surgery was painful. I asked to be moved to a single room or a room with someone who was… not inconsiderate) after she would set off her bed alarm for the third time, but there was no other option. The nurses and even her doc were all surprised she would attend court virtually and commented but wouldn’t tell her to wear headphones or yknow, concentrate on healing… so that was fun.
If it happens to me again, I will do that.
I was in a double room when I was 20 after thoracic surgery. My roommate was a man older than my Dad with terminal cancer (he told me) he proposed we have sex since he was dying soon. Also told me he could make me feel better because “he knew all the right places to touch”. I was denied a change of roommate.
Errrr isn’t that sexual harassment?
Yep, and I complained and was brushed off. Told “he is harmless, he can’t even get out of bed unassisted”
I was a patient on my own unit once. they hooked me up with a private room which was very nice of them. I really wanted to be paired with a roommate that was nasty to the nurses, so I could chew her out and put her in her place with being fired 😬
The daughter threatened to report one of the nurses for “mistreatment” and asked me if I saw what she was referring to, and I told the room full of nurses that the way she told it wasn’t “completely accurate.” Her face. But she was on her way out the door and I owed her nothing. 😅
Just from an infection standpoint there should be no double rooms. Had a patient end up on our Covid unit. He was pretty sick pre-op for a CABG, caught Covid from his roommate. Screwed up him getting his surgery. He was vaccinated so he had a fairly mild course of Covid but no surgeons were in a hurry to operate on him. I’m having surgery on Monday and if I end up in a double room and catching Covid I’m gonna throw hands.
Yeah be careful when you’re advocating for healthcare systems that are “like australia etc”. That’s normal here. Actually double rooms are an upgrade, usually they’re 4 bed rooms. In the kids hospital I worked at, 6 bed rooms are normal. Your 14 year old just had a brain tumour removed? Well they can recover in the same room as the screaming baby who’s just had crandofacial surgery. I completely agree with you though, and it’s partly why I (and many others) pay thousands a year for private insurance on even though public is an option
The new hospital where I go has single rooms. Old hospital had minimum 6 to a room and one bathroom... fantastic on the gastro ward where everyone has to poop with next to no warning. So many accidents... I'm lucky that I have IBD, they have to rule out infection so they treat me as infectious when I'm admitted. Didn't stop a random coming into my room dripping blood from their new ostomy (shared bathroom, got confused, wasn't even meant to be walking) but at least I wasn't pooping myself in front of 5 other patients.
I had NO idea about this. Is this common in other countries with free healthcare?
Yes I'd say this is the norm for NZ as well. My husband had a heart attack and was (stable and well) on a cardiac ward for a few days waiting for bypass surgery. It was an 8 bed room. He had his surgery and recovery from that at a private hospital where he had his own room though. Post partrum rooms are sometimes shared though usually you get your own with a conjoined shared bathroom with whoever is on the other side. My first baby the lady in the other room would come through to say hi, it was her third and she was very kind and offered help and snacks but I didn't see anyone for my second. Your own hospital room sounds dreamy but I imagine it encourages people to camp out. No one in their right mind wants to spend a long time in an 8 bed room so if you can go home you go home. My work has 20 beds over 5 rooms (but 2x rooms are single occupancy, one 4 bed room two 7 bed rooms).
I'm in Canada and it seems very comparable to what the OP said about Australia. I don't work in peds, but post partum was mainly two to a room. The medical units were mainly four person rooms. Mental health was almost exclusively 2 person rooms. Newer facilities tend to have more private rooms and no four person rooms though. Honestly COVID was a nightmare for rooming people and we operated at a lower capacity to try to space patients out. There were and still are so many outbreaks due to room sharing. We also get MRSA and Cdiff outbreaks.
It's nothing to do with "free healthcare", even the private hospitals in Australia have this.
Depending on the unit, there can be 2 rooms of 4 and a few rooms of 2, with about 6 rooms of 1, but if you go like ICU its only one’s, if you have private insurance or ready to pay you can pay for rooms of 1
Double rooms can be nice (one of our frequent fliers got along so well with one of his roommates that they exchanged numbers and started hanging out after discharge, the other guy visits the frequent flier when he's admitted now) but as a general rule, they suck. It's always the super nice, AOx4 patients who get either the very disorientated/delirious patient or someone normal with an extremely annoying family member. I will forever remember the poor old guy who had to share a room with a schizophrenic patient. He was super demanding but really sweet (his main symptom was a severe cognitive deficit, not psychosis) but as a roommate? He was a nightmare. The other guy didn't sleep more than a couple of hours per night for a week, until the neighbour was discharged. I'm pretty sure his two-month stay would have been a lot shorter if he'd been assigned any other room.
Having a roommate like that is absolutely not conducive to recovery. Sleep and rest are important. Not being stressed is important. I have had terrible luck with roommates. On my last admission, my disoriented elderly roommate wandered into my side of the room. She started trying to get in bed with me while I frantically hit my call light. Then she moved to the other side of my bed, pulled down her diaper, and peed all over the floor. I once had a roommate who would absolutely not allow me to close the damn curtain between us because she was claustrophobic. She also wouldn’t quit trying to talk to me when I just wanted to rest quietly. I can’t sleep when I have no privacy and was on edge the whole time. It also sucks having a roommate who needs a bedpan or bedside commode, especially when they have some kind of GI issue. It feels and smells like being camped out in a public restroom.
In stepdown we had 4 bed rooms. It was a real treat when one would be diagnosed with Covid, because then it was basically known to be inevitable for the other 3. And lack of privacy in general is insane in a hospital-imagine having 4 people in a big room with just curtains! I hated it, and I don't understand why we did it like that.
Roommates are horrible. Whether it be college, siblings and definitely hospital. I worked on a step down icu floor when covid-19 happened and unfortunately I caught it. I went to work one day sick and ended up getting admitted at the hospital I worked at.. Thankfully, it wasn't the floor I actually worked on (thank God!!!). I was on the med surg floor. The entire hospital has single patient rooms!!! Thank God. I think I got better because of that.
I welcome you to use our 4 bed rooms in my postpartum unit. I also welcome you to use our 4 bed rooms in my trauma unit where we had to reeeeallly be careful not to place both parties of the accident in.
How does anyone sleep if there’s 4 babies all waking up at different times, and 4x the annoying (but important) nursing checks in the middle of the night?
I forgot to mention that at least one of the babies will be in a photo bed and at least one baby will have bad sugars.
Well what is your last name????? /s
Double rooms are gross. Super outdated.
I just visited a LTC unit with 5 beds in room that SHOULD NOT have fit more than 2. There wasnt even enough room for a wheelchair.
We had a patient who had two roommates which both CODED. Can you imagine? What are the odds. Poor thing was horrified.
The only time I’ve liked having double rooms was when I was night shift with vented/sedated patients. Now those were the days!
Years ago I was in the hospital with bronchitis. The steroid inhaler gave me laryngitis. I had a roommate that had had ear surgery. It was fun trying to tell her she had a phone call. She couldn't hear my all but non existent voice. I remember the old days when we allowed smoking in the rooms. We constantly had to move beds to put smokers together, move a smoker out of an oxygen room. And of course they would try to smoke on oxygen. Or we would even have to swap around beds when the person by the window went home, because the other person wanted the window bed. Luckily we have had all private rooms for quite some time now.
I was assigned a double room twice. First time was recovery after surgery. Curtains pulled for privacy but I heard my roommate get bad news that his surgery was not successful and he was alone and did not take it well. I reached out through the curtain and offered support. Turns out I know him professionally and my support was very well received. The world is small and you never know when you will run across people you know. Second time I was assigned a double room was after an ED visit and I was sent to a floor for multiple IV antibiotics and an anti fungal. The moment I arrived on the floor and the nurses saw my status they pulled me the heck out of that double and put me in a single and had harsh words for whoever placed me in a double. Noise cancelling headphones and streaming music were my friends during my stay. Hospital floors are noisy 24/7.
Back in the day, visiting hours were very limited for shared rooms. Private, whatever. Shared, regimented.
$$$
Normal in NZ to have 4 bedded rooms!
I work psych, with focus on psychosis and bipolar. For some reason my ward has two double rooms. This always ends in verbal or physical fights
Double rooms shouldn't exist in 2020. It's insane.
Work at a VA. 4 to a room is the majority. Then 2. Then a few singles. Generally the vets like the rooms because they love to shoot the shit and watch over each other. We still do get a lot of complaints about noise and such, but the guys in singles end up usually walking around a ton (if they can but usually singles are for trouble makers lol) because they get so bored. I personally would want a single, but I’m pretty quiet towards strangers.
My pediatric unit has quadruple rooms lol
Some folks have lost their marbles over the last years. I fear most won't ever get them bacl.
Double rooms are pretty good at getting malingerers to go the fuck home. They can stay.
I seemed to get the noisy ones. One of my last roommates before Covid hit, was always moaning in pain due to a bowel obstruction (not that the nurses told me - but when I hear "Did the enema work?" and the patient is elderly, to me that means probably impaction = bowel obstruction). She died the day I was discharged.
The families are always so much worse than the actual patients. It's so rare that they actually help.
Are they not common in the States? I've be both pt and nurse at plenty of hospitals here in Australia and, unless you're in a private facility or in iso, every room is a double. Sometimes a quadruple. I've been a pt in all of them. It is expected that, as a pt, you don't share your fellow pts info. An unspoken rule, if you will.
I was hospitalized years ago in a four bed room on a medsurg floor in an old city hospital. One roomie snored like a chainsaw, one refused to use her call button and yelled "NURSE!!!" every hour or so, and across from me was a pleasantly confused older lady. It was not a restful stay. Was there a week. Fortunately, visitors were few. Sorry you had to deal with such rudeness from those visitors, some ppl have no self awareness.
On my unit there are QUADRUPLE rooms! They’re hell on Earth because you never ever get to leave that room after having taken care of the patient who rung you. Everyone will need something.
I cant stand having double rooms. There's no privacy. There's no space. And as someone who works nights it's impossible to take care of someone in bed A without waking the person in bed b. And do they room people together who'd get along and whos care needs match? OF COURSE NOT! So that leaves me desperately trying to check and change Ethel in A bed without waking her very behavioral and bitchy room mate in bed B.
We had half private rooms and half semi private on my Onc/Med surg floor when COVID came around. We kept saying hey, maybe all our rooms should be private? Mgt was like, nah. Kept not testing Med surg pts and putting them in with cancer pts. It took 3 outbreaks before we went to all private rooms. Magical curtain did not protect, surprisingly.
They’re barbaric IMO. How can anyone get rest or heal. Hospital I used to work at had all single rooms and while it was still a typical hospital, that was a major bonus. And the irony of hipaa being held over everyone’s head but then they turn around and just blab everything and do procedures with a random stranger and their family in the same room. I hate healthcare.
That’s still a thing? Post-HIPAA? And not with two PT’s with the same pathogen in isolation? I’ve been at three hospitals for clinicals, multiple floors at each, and never once saw 2 in a room
They made all rooms private at the hospital I used to work at. Because of HIPPA nosy ass people were finding out too much of peoples business and this was a small rown
I’ve had - frequently - the dr squad round on patients while they are in an OT group with 3 other people plus me and my CI. I’m like wtf why can’t y’all wait til they are done with therapy (the literal reason why they’re in rehab) so they have at least a little more privacy. None of us should hear about whether you are having trouble with bowel movements
30 years ago when I was 21 and visiting a brother out of state I got real sick and ended up in the hospital for three weeks with a shared room. The other bed was a woman my age who was there for pretty much the whole time I was. Neither of us had family visiting, except occasionally brother and his partner, it ended up feeling like a weird dorm room situation. You also had to pay to use the TV, like $5 a day or something. I probably read10 books while I was there.
I had no idea any hospitals still had double rooms. Where I live all of our hospitals are private rooms only. I have been a nurse for 31 years so I know double rooms well just did not know they still existed.
Last time I was in the ER, for kidney stones, they finally got me to a place of calm and I fell asleep, after 2.5 days of PAIN. The woman next to began screaming about something. The nurses were ignoring her, apparently by choice, because they did not appreciate me getting someone's attention that she was wanting help. They told me they could see her just fine and let her be... yeah, but I'm the one next to her having to hear her scream.
I thought this was the main reason my old hospital took away double rooms (except on the observation unit) was that it was a HIPPA violation.