How Lone Worker Devices Can Protect Nurses on Duty

Nurses have tough jobs. They step in when most everyone else runs out. Nurses handle nasty things, frightened and irritable family members, demanding doctors, brutal schedules, and people who are sick or injured and aren’t in the best of moods or conditions. Additionally, nurses are also often exposed to violence.  Some hospitals have implemented policies for nurses to carry ordinary mobile devices, like smartphones or tablets, but these devices come with problems, as you’ll soon see. The ideal solution is lone working devices like Guardian security alarms that nurses can use anywhere, anytime, in virtually any situation.

Nurses are Faced With Scary Patients and Situations

Nurses have to be there for everyone, including the young and helpless and the large and angry.

Nurses are charged with caring for people with psychiatric disorders, those who have been victims or victimized others in acts of violence, patients with undiagnosed medical conditions, often communicable, and people who are angry, scared, unconscious, in pain, on hallucinogenic drugs, and many other potential scenarios. Security alarms allow nurses to summon help when things get out of hand, and many of the alarms can be programmed to alert if the nurse falls to the ground or is unable to respond to calls for any reason. These alarms can be lifesavers in predicaments like hostage situations, times when patients who are too large to be moved fall and take the nurse with them, or when patients attack a nurse and no one is around to help.

Nurses Spend Long Hours Alone With Helpless or Dangerous Patients

Ann was working alone on her unit one night, when a new patient became immediately and violently angry due to an uncommon reaction to the medication she was on. While Ann is trained to handle a number of medical and psychological emergencies, she was caught completely off guard because she was changing the patient’s undergarments when the attack occurred. With her hands virtually helpless, it took her several minutes and all her wits to gain control of the situation and summon help. With a security alarm, Ann could have signaled for help much quicker, possibly avoiding some of the minor scratches, bruises, and injuries she and the patient incurred during the incident.

Nurses Say Smartphones Introduce Germs Into the Environment

Mobile devices like cell phones can introduce dangerous germs into environments where patients are extremely susceptible to infections.

Many hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical facilities have tried cell phones to keep nurses safe and connected. The problem is, like everyone else, nurses also carry their phones in their purses or bags, with them to the kitchen, into the bathroom, and to public places like churches, movie theaters, nightclubs, and other highly unsanitary places. It is almost impossible to completely sanitize a mobile device without damaging it. That makes mobile phones and tablets a very unsafe item to use as an alert mechanism in patient rooms, ERs, nursing homes, and other medical facilities.

Nurses Often Can’t Get a Cellular Signal

Hospitals are built for the best protection possible. Depending on the area of the country, hospitals are usually designed to withstand the best that Mother Nature has to offer the region. Most are rated to tolerate earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, and other disasters. That means that the walls are often impenetrable by cellular signals. It is not unusual at all for nurses to report a total lack of service when inside the facilities at which they work. Portable personal alarms, however, can be used even in the most secure facilities or underground where cellular signals can’t go.

Nurses Can Have Medical Emergencies, Too

Nurses can become patients when they fall, have a reaction to medicine, get sick, or otherwise injured. Alarms that are programmed to alert help if the nurse cannot respond or falls to the ground are ideal for protecting these workers even in the event of total incapacitation.

To learn more about these alarms, how they work, and how the nurses at your facility can benefit, request a quote for our Guardian security alarms today.