Correctional Nursing: Care vs. Safety

Corrections can be a hard and often times a difficult environment to practice good healthcare delivery.  In my previous blog I defined what a corrections nurse is.  He/She wears many hats in the medical department.  The corrections nurse also wears another hat in the security department.  There are myths that corrections can be an unsafe working environment, especially for non-custody staffy.  Nurses learn during school in Nursing 101 that safety comes first; however, corrections brings a new meaning to the word.  Safety has to be a priority at all times in a correctional setting.  That same safety sometimes outweighs the delivery of care.  For correctional staff, including nurses safety becomes a way of life.  Some practice issues include:  Carry all keys, radios with your pens, needles, medicines on your person, setting appropriate touch boundaries while performing assessments, demonstrating professional language when transmitting and receiving information, and providing care to patient while restrained. All of these challenges, make it difficult for nurses to provide care within the confines of custody.  Please share your thought and let us know if you have found the above practice issues to be true?

What is a Corrections Nurse?

With National Nurses Week just around the corner, often time the most valuable people in nursing get missed, Corrections Nurses.  Have you ever heard a negative comment about your job from a fellow nurse?  Their misconceptions include:  "all you work with convicts" or "all you do is pass pills"  Not, true, a corrections nurse is a dynamic nurse leader.  She functions independently within her scope of practices.  She jumps in with both feet grounded.  She is a multi-tasker.. She cannot be defined by only one definition.  Corrections nurses understand fast paced critical care at the spur of the moment.  On a day to day basis corrections nurses are: responding to medical emergencies, passing pills, performing treatments, assessing clients in medical observation, drawing labs, performing IV therapy, completing sick call, assisting the MD, completing CQI, assisting with daily Chronic Clinic, and completing intakes not with 6-8 patients like Med-Surg or 1-2 patients in ICU but with 500-600 clients daily.  Thanks for your dedication, endurance, dedication, committment and work ethic.  You often go un-noticed so today I salute "Corrections Nurses" everywhere.

Corrections Nurses: Hazing the New Kid on the Block

Have you ever been the new kid on the block?  Afraid to say or do something wrong.  Then, you meet what has to be the worse nurse in the history of nursing.  She is inpatient, grouchy and yelling at everybody.  This attitude among nurses has become a growing and widespread phenomenon in some environments, especially corrections.   Such environments lead to great risk of causing mental and physical damage to the health of a new nurse.  It can make or break them.  Has anyone else ever encounter this problem?