How would you handle this ?

[brenda seal]

From what I understand from reading the boards here , the health system is very different here in Australia . The dialysis centres are attached to large hospitals rather than being privately operated . Laurie receives his treatment at  large teaching hospital which is about 20 kilometres  from home . Our local hospital has a smaller dialysis centre but they only accept patients who can walk in and walk out and who are otherwise stable , also they only have chairs . Up to now , Laurie is still not walking and cannot sit in a chair for four hours .
This afternoon someone rang from his centre and said due to the large number of inpatients tomorrow requiring dialysis Laurie should go to another centre - one more than 40kms from home for his treatment . Laurie was only discharged from hospital on Tuesday night after a 12 day admission and is still very weak , he has a PICC line and is still on antibiotics via a 24 hour Baxter infusor . The ambulatory care nurses are coming to the house on non-dialysis days to change the infusor and they do it at dialysis on the days he is there . On Thursday a nurse from the renal ward came down to dialysis and held a mini in-service to show the dialysis nurses how to change the infusor .
Laurie explained all this and refused to go to the other hospital , they argued the point but in the end he got his way . The problem is now he feels terrible and thinks they will think badly of him , He has always cooperated with their requests before , even when they have changed his shift with only 20 minutes notice .
Surely if someone bothered to read his notes they would have realized there was someone more suitable to change centres .

[boswife]

If i understand correctly, The nurses at 'his' dialysis center have been trained to do a particular job, so he needs to go there, and yes, there has to be someone else more suited to do a temporary move.  I know how he probably feels about 'getting his way' because though i will fight for my 'way' on things like this, i always worry about retaliation, BUT.,,,,,,,,,,, in these situations, you only get your way because your right and we have never seen further objections to any particular situation.  I would hope you could stick with your usual place for D,  as without training, they may just say 'no can do' and then you have another situation   I wish you well... This is hard 

[Sydnee]

If Laurie convinced the Hospital he needs to stay at "his dialysis unit" then he made valid points they could not refute. He did the right thing for you both. although I'm in America I would guess the person making the decision to have him move was not the people that treat him but some administrator. The person probably didn't even look at his chart. So there shouldn't be any "bad feelings" over this. 

[monrein]

I would address the potential issue of bad feelings by going at it head on.  I'd talk to the charge nurse or manager or whatever you call her/him there and explain why I felt that I needed to refuse this request although I generally try to be as cooperative as possible.  I doubt there are feelings on their part but it never hurts to let staff know that while you understand the complexities of scheduling issues that they deal with every day sometimes you have to put your needs first.