Rex Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center

...better known as RRNCC. I'm getting a taste of LTC and rehab nutrition with the RD at RRNCC this week. So far, the experience hasn't inspired me to pursue LTC. This impression may be colored by the fact I've had to learn a different schedule and system for assessments, figure out a completely new system for charting, hunt down paper records from a dozen different places, and circle through the nurse's station countless times trying to find a missing chart. The cases are generally less interesting and less varied, and the brief patient encounters don't add much personality. It is fun, though, to walk out of the office and be confronted by five or six residents aimlessly shuffling down the hall in their wheelchairs. It's a little like bumper cars, and today I witnessed a little chair-rage with a near collision and 4-chair pile-up. Picture it. It's good.

I also had to sit through an overly-long meeting yesterday that could have been reduced to 10 minutes if everyone had been required to watch "Getting to Yes" like I was in Business Management/Human Resources while at Ohio State. Basically, everyone was upset that the RD's at one of Rex's other LTC facilities weren't getting early consults for newly admitted patients, but no one was willing to budge on how to resolve the issue until 45 minutes into the meeting when the real issue came out...that charts are never available because people take them without signing for them.