At a regular community team morning meeting, where the day’s jobs are assigned, a female patient’s name came up. She was on a downward slide and thus needed a visit to check her mental state. NB there are heaven knows how many patients ‘under’ a community team but don’t have an assigned CPN or CCO. The waiting list to get one was closer to 12 than 6 months for this team. Over the years, patients improve enough to have their CPN re-assigned to someone else, but they are still on our books and we get the first call.
PDs, especially Borderlines, Narcissists and Histrionics are ready to complain at the drop of a pronoun. It’s a successful way of lashing out and hurting someone on the coal face. Managers never face this risk. They don’t engage with patients. And these vexatious complaints are treated with the same seriousness and rigour as those from people who’ve a genuine grievance and have never done it before.
So, the patient’s previous CPN was asked to go and see her. But they didn’t want to take the job because last time the pt and her family had invented a bullshit complaint against them. It took ages to resolve, the CPN was treated as guilty until proven innocent and suffered a lot of stress. Naturally, they didn’t want to go through that a second time and declined. In the end, two staff had to go when one would have done. Having a credible witness present dissuades most false, vindictive complaints. NB patients are never charged or prosecuted for making false accusations. Whereas the staff does NOT have to be guilty to be found guilty by management, hence the anxiety and stress. Managers do not have to prove reasonable doubt, they can condemn you on the balance of probabilities standard. And if you have made an enemy of them, they’ll find you guilty even when you’re innocent. I know whereof I speak.
In a different hospital, quite a lot of decades ago, there was another patient, a PD, can’t remember which breed, who was also a barrack-room lawyer. There are some long-term patients who because they remain perpetually dangerous to the public are thus locked up for many years. Making complaints was this one’s entertainment. He regularly complained of staff assaulting him and got them suspended. Nobody was ever found guilty (I’m using legal language here, officially, complaints were upheld or not). Eventually, someone in the union or management lost their patience, started a legal process which ended, eventually, with him being declared a vexatious litigant. That meant management didn’t have to investigate his complaints, they could bin the letters and assume they were bogus. I suspect summary justice ensued.
A learning difficulty patient complained to his psychologist (how exactly I don’t know because he only had a vocab of a hundred or so words) that at night, after the day staff had left, the night shift would drag him out of his room, strip him naked, tie him to a wooden pole in the middle of the dayroom and dance around him in a demonic black mass. Oh yes, there was a little campfire in the circle too. Pretty tricky not to set the smoke alarms off. And we’re quite strict about not having wooden poles or anything else that can be made into a weapon, hanging around on the ward. The psychologist reported it and courageous managers investigated. Oddly, no evidence of campfire burns on the dayroom carpet were found.
For more than twenty years, psychologists have been obliged to report all accusations and suspicions. Their professional body made it a requirement, which probably means they can be disbarred (or whatever the correct word is) if they don’t. Not all of them grass nurses up gleefully. That case came before all that.
It it doesn’t have to be this way, but while it is, patient complaint handling is one more stick managers can beat you with and yet another way nursing has become a rubbish job.
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