u/Red-Heart42

I’m going into my last week of fieldwork at a short term inpatient rehab. My supervisor basically told me she has “safety concerns” and worries I’m relying too much on her to step in specifically with transfers. The problem is that I don’t need her to step in, she just does. For example, we have a patient who is deteriorating rapidly and this has been documented by PT, OT, Nursing, and Doctors. He is elderly and having medical issues and extremely weak and sick getting worse every day. Yesterday he sat with nothing under him and wouldn’t listen to cues so I had to drag the w/c under him to prevent a fall. Today we were getting him up and I wanted to change his clothes in bed to reduce fatigue but she said we should do EOB because that’s what he was doing before. So I do that and he’s leaning his entire body weight on me while sitting, no sitting balance at all. Then she wants me to have him do his own socks and thread his pants because he was doing it before, but I wasn’t going to have him lean forward when he can’t hold himself up so I said that (more professionally). Then he stands and his flimsy hospital pants (all he chooses to wear and yells at us if we try to tie it) fall to his ankles, I say I’m gonna sit him down and get them back up. There’s no reason he can’t sit down and stand back up, he’s just as if not more fatigued standing longer. She says no and insists I can pull up his pants while I’m holding him upright with Mod A and he’s leaning his weight on me unable to maintain balance. But she’s the CI so I do that and then he does the same thing when we go to pivot, sits on nothing and doesn’t respond to us yelling at him to stop so I have to physically move him into the chair by the gait belt.

Then at the end of the day she tells me I “need her to step in too much”. I wanted to do things the safer way because he’s clearly declining and at immense fall risk, she told me not to and I did it the way she said because I’m the student and I’m supposed to listen to her but then I’m blamed. I tried to use my own clinical judgment, it was overrun, and then I’m blamed for not using my clinical judgment. I don’t know what to do now. Do I do what she says or insist and prove I can do things alone? I feel like either way I’m fucked, either way she can say I’m unsafe because I need her help or I’m unsafe because I don’t take instruction. I’m really upset, really scared of failing. I’m supposed to email her my plan to improve for the last week and I don’t know how to express this professionally or if I should express this at all.