What is the name of your state? NV
I got some patient's lung discharge on my hands on Thursday. I do delivery, usually o2 and wheelchairs and stuff, worked for a courier company and the company that we deliver for liked me, so they hired me permanently. This day, they added a call to my app, it has "Clinical Therapy Visit IV" on it, usually they take these off because this is outside my duties. My normal duties are delivering O2, wheelchairs and such. So they called me back to the warehouse and said they needed a delivery of a suction machine to a patient that had broke his machine. I thought it was like handing off the equipment, waiting and then taking the old one away which is what I normally do as I'm not a trained medical person. I've seen these machines in the shop, but have never been trained on them, they didn't even give me a book or any instruction on it, which is why I wasn't concerned, because I thought I was just going to hand it to them (it looks like a small nylon lunchbox) NOPE, patient was like, why do you think I broke the first one? he says, I didn't know how to connect it. Connect if for me. Doh. So I did and got some phlegm/lung XXX on me. Eww. Turned out the guy has some kind of Pneumonia. They wanted to know at the shop why I didn't wear latex gloves. Because stupid, you have three respiratory therapists (RT) that should do this kind of stuff. They even took the small van that I used to drive because the RT's are supposed to do these type of calls and make me drive a huge truck now. I'll be honest, the patient asked me, is this connected correctly? How the hell should I know? To me, this is like malpractice in action. I'm wondering if I should sue the company for this exposure and lack of training. And then I read on another forum about therapy that you can take for exposure to HIV (I don't know if the patient has HIV or hepatitis or disease other than Pneumonia), but you have to take it within 72 hours.
I got some patient's lung discharge on my hands on Thursday. I do delivery, usually o2 and wheelchairs and stuff, worked for a courier company and the company that we deliver for liked me, so they hired me permanently. This day, they added a call to my app, it has "Clinical Therapy Visit IV" on it, usually they take these off because this is outside my duties. My normal duties are delivering O2, wheelchairs and such. So they called me back to the warehouse and said they needed a delivery of a suction machine to a patient that had broke his machine. I thought it was like handing off the equipment, waiting and then taking the old one away which is what I normally do as I'm not a trained medical person. I've seen these machines in the shop, but have never been trained on them, they didn't even give me a book or any instruction on it, which is why I wasn't concerned, because I thought I was just going to hand it to them (it looks like a small nylon lunchbox) NOPE, patient was like, why do you think I broke the first one? he says, I didn't know how to connect it. Connect if for me. Doh. So I did and got some phlegm/lung XXX on me. Eww. Turned out the guy has some kind of Pneumonia. They wanted to know at the shop why I didn't wear latex gloves. Because stupid, you have three respiratory therapists (RT) that should do this kind of stuff. They even took the small van that I used to drive because the RT's are supposed to do these type of calls and make me drive a huge truck now. I'll be honest, the patient asked me, is this connected correctly? How the hell should I know? To me, this is like malpractice in action. I'm wondering if I should sue the company for this exposure and lack of training. And then I read on another forum about therapy that you can take for exposure to HIV (I don't know if the patient has HIV or hepatitis or disease other than Pneumonia), but you have to take it within 72 hours.
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