LPN Duties – Nursing Homes Vs. Hospitals
Two of the biggest factors that play a role in what your scope of practice will look like as a LPN are the regulations set by both your state and your health care facility. Your scope of practice either expands or contracts depending on which regulations they choose to use. Most LPNs will find themselves working in either a hospital or nursing homes. These tend to be very large facilities and thus employ large nursing staffs.
In both hospitals and nursing homes, as a LPN, you will provide physical and emotional care to patients. Physical care includes everything from passing medications and performing treatments to giving back rubs and helping with showering. Emotional care, aka psycho-social care, will have you dealing with cultural, spiritual and growth and development. Don’t forget the ever present charting done in both settings.
The differences really lie in the type of facility you work in.
LPNs in Nursing Homes
Nursing home patients are mostly elderly or disabled. Here the nursing home is just that, their home. They live there year round and their chances of living outside of the nursing home are very slim. LPN duties and concerns will involve keeping them at their optimal level of health. You will need a strong knowledge base on chronic disease processes. Monitoring will involve keeping track of each patient’s health status and knowing when a change signals a problem. LPN job description also involves working closely with Physical and Occupational Therapist, working with the patients under your care daily to maintain their physical status.
In a nursing home, LPNs duties focus less on recovery and more on helping the patients do all they can for themselves. You will see limited medical interventions, more personal items in the rooms and you will grow to know your patients in a way you cannot in the hospital. To them, you will become more their family than their own flesh and blood. They will rely on you and look to you as they finish out their lives.
LPNs in Hospitals
In a hospital, on the other hand, LPNs duties involves treating a wide range of ages – from birth to old age. The focus here is on bringing an acutely sick patient back to their optimum norm, on healing. The pace is faster, with the goal to get the patient out in as little time as possible. More time is spent on the physical healing and less on the emotional condition. Patients have little say in the scheduling of their day or control in what goes on in the hospital.
LPNs in the hospital find themselves more concerned about the medical condition of their patients. Most of their time will be spent monitoring bodily functions and vitals, as well as performing various medical treatments. Charting in the hospital consumes more time with the faster pace of care. Your will not have the time to get to know your patients very well as they often change daily.
One final difference lies in autonomy. In hospitals LPNs find themselves working under the direction of a RN, and sometimes a MD. This is not the case in most nursing homes. While RNs do work at nursing homes, there are times when only LPNs will be working. You will often have the option to be trained as a charge nurse and work without supervision.
The basic duties of LPNs do not vary much between types of health care facilities. The changes are based on the type of patients in the facility where you work. Both nursing homes and hospitals care for the physical and emotional aspects of their patients. Hospitals focus on healing and bringing the acutely ill back to the best possible health. Nursing homes want to maintain their patients’ current health level and seek to provide more emotional care.