Tension in the RT Cave

What I wrote in my previous post, "New policy enacted to make RTs perfect," was my facetious interpretation of some of the rules the administration has laid down on us RTs in an attempt to improve our charting.

Personally, I think the RT bosses and the administration are well intentioned in their attempt at making us better at charting. Here, allow me to highlight two very important reasons why RT bosses might require their RTs to clamp down and at least try to do a better job of charting.

First one must realize the following:

1) All of our charting is now electronic, and billing is automatically done when we hit file. For example, if an RT does CPT, and forgets to click on CPT when he does his charting, then that is one procedure that is not billed for. Even though this doesn't happen on a regular basis, it still happens. According to the RT bosses, even these little mistakes have amounted to $30,000 in un-billed procedures over the past billing period alone. Especially in these hard economic times, these little errors can be very costly.

2) If an RT is called to court, accurate and complete charting can be of a major benefit to the hospital. We had an instance lately at Shoreline where a case went to court mainly because one nurse did shoddy charting. However, the RTs did excellent charting, and this resulted in the case getting thrown out. (I will write about this later.)

So, these two situations amounted to the administration clamping down on this particular RT department. They simply want us to pay more attention to our charting.

However, the major problem with this was not the general idea, but the way it was communicated to us by our RT boss. The general feeling among us RTs was that the bosses no longer cared about patient care so long as we charted accurately. I must add that this was not true, it's simply how it came across.

I understood the animosity of the department, I listened to the complainers, and even found myself complaining myself. After all, I am not perfect. In my opinion, perfection is a flaw in itself.

However, when I was left a note last week that I forgot to pull a file on an EKG, and my supervisor told me this was "unacceptable." I came back with the following line in my humble attempt to explain to her that perfection is not possible.

"Say, for example," I said, "We RTs do 100 procedures, and our charting is perfect on 99 of those 100. That's a 99% rate of success. Do you consider that unacceptable."

"Yes," she said, "I do."

"99% is unacceptable."

"Absolutely."

"Well, then, what can I say. I guess you'll have to fire us all, because we are all going to make mistakes from time to time."

In a rare occurrence, I found myself arguing with my boss. It's not that I tried to fight with her, I was merely trying to explain to her why the animosity; why the low morale.

Later, in discussing this with my good friend and fellow RT Jane Sage, she explained it this way:

"I have worked here for 20 years," she said, "and for 19-and-a-half of those years no one ever said anything about my charting being unacceptable. Now, all of a sudden my charting is unacceptable. So, what that tells me, is that I was unacceptable for all of those 20 years and no one told me. I've always been an awefull charter, and no one said a word."

Hell, I've even heard complaining from RTs who never complain, so obviously there was something wrong here. So when I approached my supervisor again to inform her of the problem, and that some RTs were already talking about quitting if the RT Boss starting writing RTs up for not being perfect.

As I was approaching her for the third time on this matter, she emphatically told me I was being ridiculous. "This all wouldn't be a problem if our billing wasn't dropped right from our charting. As with many hospitals, we have had some financial bla bla bla bla...

So, in rare form, I told her I was going to quit.