How very dare they complain about my nursing when they didn’t take adequate care of their child. How very dare they complain about my clinical judgement on appropriate first aid when they didn’t do any first aid themselves. How very dare they criticise my choice of analgesia when it was delivered to their injured child within 2 minutes of them arriving in the department (for a controlled drug, no less. If you’ve got any idea of how Controlled Drugs work, you’ve got to believe that’s impressive). How very dare they accuse me of forcing their child to have first aid whilst screaming and fighting when in fact I asked the mother to administer it while I got analgesia. And how very dare they misrepresent the advice from the team that helped their child.
I know why this has arisen, because when Social Services knocked on their door, and the Health Visitor popped around to check how mum’s coping with the kids (because to our eyes, she wasn’t coping very well) that must have upset the applecart in middleclassland. But to complain about us, when we helped your family? Well, you can get stuffed.
Thankfully, the Sister who asked me to write a statement to answer the complaint said “There’s really nothing to answer, you did everything right”. My clinical judgement was correct, and I’ve the evidence to prove it. But it’s left me fuming. I had things to do today after work, but instead I’m stuck doing this. And the irony is, I didn’t report them to the Health Visitor or Social Services; that was actually the staff who saw her at clinic and noted the story they gave then didn’t match the story they gave in A&E; one of the more common signs of abuse. We certainly discussed whether they warranted a referral to Social Services, or just the Health Visitor (more because we were concerned about the mother’s ability to cope with her children than the actual injury, the explanation for which was plausible), but decided that we were, having observed them for a bit, happy with the way things were.
What’s even more annoying is they’ve quoted some other family member who’s senior somewhere else who’d spouted a bucket load of crap about treatment, and has left us to pick up and sort out the mess.
So, once this is done, and we’re heading off to do our shopping we’ll stop off and get a frothy coffee, because I need some cheering up.
