Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF pronounced sniff) are long term care facilities like live in rehab centers, convalescent homes and acute care centers. They are by reputation staffed with less than the most competent of RN's. I can understand this because if I were a competent nurse I would choose to work in a hospital instead. Now this is in no way a dig on those few nurses that are great and work for SNF's.
Yesterday we got a call to go to the local acute care center for a patient that was unconscious. As my partner and I were doing our assessment we were both asking questions of the nurse (lest this seem confusing I was asking questions about the patients past medical history, allergies and medications and my partner was asking about her current condition compared to what she is normally like). This is common since the paramedics that respond to these facilities do not know the patient and the nurses do. We can get a great deal of information from nurses that know their stuff. This RN, in the middle of our assessment of her patient, said that we ask too many questions and walked away. At that point we had to go off the information that an unconscious patient could give us and go. When we told one RN at the ER about our experience she said that she would've smacked the nurse up side the head. Laughing makes it all better.
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