A Psychiatric Floor and Sick Children
... administrators of the hospital got the bright idea to put them in our overflow unit. Sick children cry a lot. They rarely sleep. When they do sleep, you want them to stay asleep. A psychiatric floor is no place for sick children! I do not feel that children should have been moved to our floor because we are a locked unit. We have to use keys to get in and out, open bathroom doors and utility room doors. Patient’s rooms are the only doors that do not lock. We get many dangerous, combative, and loud patients. Our confused patients sometimes carry baby dolls around and treat them just like their child. They walk them, rock them, and even try to feed them. Now we have real babies on the other side of the wall crying and our patients are on our side of the wall trying to get to them. They think that it is their child crying and they get very upset because they can’t get to it. The noise that our patients make scares the children and wakes them at all hours of the night.Once awake, it is hard for the child to go back to sleep. This is not conducive to healing.Also, the private elevators are on the pediatric side of the locked door. Our psychiatric patients have to be brought through that unit to ours. This could prove to be dangerous for the children. I just do not feel that the decision makers were looking at all of the problems that could arise. I do not think that this idea was v...