Miss Brown from The Pacific Northwest

[Miss Brown]

Hello, I am a medical social worker with many years hospital, home health, and other experience but recently started working at an outpatient dialysis center. It has been strongly suggested to me by corporate, staff, etc, that I should "do" something for the patients like throw a party, host bingo or other games, produce a monthly newsletter.  I came to this site for ideas and found a rather revealing and touching thread on this very idea.  I am still gathering ideas and inspiration & have started meeting with my patients individually to get their ideas on what I (and other staff) could offer to improve the experience (also to get to know them better).

Frankly, I can only imagine  being a dialysis patient but suspect I would come to the clinic with headphones and check out for four hours as best I could. I wouldn't be interested in games or entertainment but I'm not a dialysis patient. Unfortunately, a person without ESRD cannot "try" HD for the experience or I would.  I do plan to see if I can sit for even one hour in one of the chairs.  (I did have some Liquicel and it's kinda gross) If anyone has suggestions specific to activities or in general, relating to my new career, I would be open & grateful. Mainly, I wanted to join this site so I can read and learn how best to help my patients.  Thank you for including me here.

[lulu836]

.Hello Miss Brown.  Welcome to  IHD.  You are very welcome here..............pull up a chair and sit on the back porch with the rest of us. My clinic has the occasional Bingo session but that's about it.  Personally I don't participate but I do have a tablet with Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones and can watch TV from my home DVR thanks to my satellite TV  provider.  The center also has individual TVs with furnished head phones for each chair.  Mostly the "perk" I like most is techs and nurses who actually care about their patients and who stay focusesd in order to make the fewest mistakes possible.  There are so many patient and staff personalities that I imagine it would be difficult to get a group together to play anything but Bingo.

[MooseMom]

I think your gut feeling is correct, that most patients just want to be left alone to spend those hours in any way that keeps them calm and somewhat entertained.  It must be really hard to find something suitable for so many different personalities with so many different medical needs (other than needing dialysis).  It's like being on an airplane for 4 hours.  Each person finds their own way to pass the time.

Thank you very much for joining our community!

[iolaire]

Welcome to the site.  I think you have a hard job.  Well on dialysis our social workers (they changed maybe yearly) did try to do the fun things.  I think what I enjoyed the most was the boxed lunches they provided around the holidays, Thanksgiving and a few others.  The games and stuff are hard as people are doing their own things or sleeping.  I did like getting a quality lollypop when my labs were good. 

You can not make this happen but - they don't do it in the US, but almost all foreign centers provide coffee/tea and a biscuit, cookie or small sandwich midway though each session - I enjoyed that well traveling.

Oh and speaking of travel usually the social worker can help coordinate that or at least prepare all the documentation needed for the centers I visited.  So learning about how you can help people travel to other US centers would be a huge perk for me.  Most of the patients probably can not travel due to health or income but for those who can its a good perk.  Even being able to drive a state over and stay for a few days to visit family can be something people plan for most of a year and that will help their overall wellbeing.

[Charlie B53]

Welcome to IHD Ms Brown.

My  was decorated with a
Tropical theme one day by the Dietician and the Social worokers.  They even had a 'Bar' with blenders and ice chests alongside.

During our treatments they brought arouond 'Menus' of Tropical
smoothies and Slushy drink to select from.  Then they made them up and delivered to our chairs.

All these drinks were Renal Friendly.

And tasty.

It would be neat if they would do something like this more often.

[Michael Murphy]

I vote for leave me alone after 5 years I know how to entertain myself.  Want to know what dialysis is like, spend 3 to 5 hours in a recliner, don’t move one arm for the entire time, run the air conditioning full blast so you are freezing, every 30 minutes have some one squeeze your arm,  finally play a recording of all the alarms for the full time you are in the chair.  After 4 hours you will understand the horror th patents go through 3 times a week.  P.S.  there is virtually no padding in the Dialysys recliners.