28 April 2023
In the last month, First Choice (the home nursing company Kaiser uses to send a nurse to visit Joyce three times a week) has implemented a new way of providing patients with medical supplies. It's been hilarious.
Previously, each nurse would go to the office down the Peninsula and pick up whatever their patients needed for the next week. The office was pretty well supplied but didn't carry everything. So most nurses stocked their trunks with the more common and the more esoteric things their patients needed.
The run to the office was an inconvenience so the company decided to ship supplies directly to patients. The nurses would just have to order them on Thursdays.
Which, in itself, gives you some idea of the intelligence at work here. Ordering on Thursdays almost guarantees nothing will be delivered before the weekend, which itself sometimes goes into Monday for holidays.
So rather than ordering on a Tuesday, say, with a few days to deliver before the weekend, the two-day delivery window hits on the weekend.
We did get a Saturday delivery the first time, but they put a stop to that. The latest Thursday order arrived on Tuesday. From just a few miles away at Kaiser's French Hospital campus.
Yes, Kaiser is now sending the supplies the nurses order. But they have a $50 limit on what you can order at any one time.
Except Kristine the LVN has discovered that $50 limit is per order and you can order more than once a week. So we got two deliveries this week. Tuesday and Thursday.
And still the order isn't complete. It just doesn't cover the 14 Mepilex bandages we use in a week. We're up to 10, though.
Kristine, of course, knows what we need to do the dressing changes. So that isn't the issue. It's apparently the dollar limit but it may also have to do with a supply issue.
In the past, Joyce has bought the Mepilex from Byram. You may remember what a disaster that was. She had to pay for those. She isn't charged under the new system.
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Oh, there's one more wrinkle.
To protect her skin from the aggravation of the Mepilex adhesive, a liquid polymer is applied. In the past, First Choice supplied SurePrep and that worked very well. But Kaiser is supplying Cavilon and that reacts with the Mepilex adhesive so that it detaches from the Mepilex and remains on her skin. Which itches.
I had some SurePrep left so I switched back to it and the adhesive problem disappeared. That's how we found out. Kristine has reported it but we don't expect any resolution.
Things just don't work that way.