Safety Concerns for Visiting Nurses

Visiting nurses are based in the community and often go into patients’ homes to provide nursing services.  Home healthcare is a convenience to patients who are not mobile, but visiting nurses must exercise caution when it comes to providing such assistance. By understanding what some of the safety concerns are, visiting nurses can protect themselves and avoid unsafe situations.

High Crime Neighbourhoods

Some patients may live in neighborhoods that are not as safe as others, and visiting nurses will be required to travel to them. During this trip, the visiting nurse must be aware of the safety risks in high-crime neighborhoods, such as walking from the car to the patient’s home in the dark or driving through gang-present streets. Violence and crime are hazards to visiting nurses, especially when it gets dark outside.

Unpredictable Patient Behavior

When visiting nurses provide in-home services to patients, security staff or other team members are not around to help if a patient gets out of control. Patient behavior can be unpredictable, especially if visiting nurses are attending to patients with psychiatric issues, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. If a patient becomes agitated or violent, the nurse must exercise caution to stay safe, even if that means leaving the house. For this reason, a visiting nurse may travel with a partner to visit patients who display unstable behaviors.

Patient’s Home Environment

The patient’s home environment could be unsafe for a visiting nurse. When nurses are called out to visit a patient at home they are not forewarned with information such as whether the patient has an aggressive dog or is using one of the bedrooms as a meth lab. Nurses that arrive at a patient’s home must assess the environment for safety issues. Whenever drug paraphernalia is observed the nurse must reschedule the visit and leave immediately.

If a nurse feels like the environment is unsafe due to animals or other people being in the home with the patient, the nurse should also leave immediately and report the findings.

Personal Safety

Visiting nurses are encouraged to practice personal safety by taking steps to reduce the amount of information that patients know about them. For instance, the name tag that the nurse wears should only reveal the nurse’s first name, not the last. Nurses should not expose their last names to patients that they do not feel comfortable with. Additionally, visiting nurses should not wear flashy jewelry or accessories to home visits, and should be careful about using an expensive cell phone in front of a patient unless it’s a core part of the their administration and communication equipment.

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