I 21f work in a Medicare/medicaid funded nursing home. It’s a pretty shitty place, the worst of the worst as far as nursing homes go. It’s dirty, we don’t have hot water half the time, and there’s been a million reports to the state.

Almost all of our residents have little to no family involvement, and the few that do come from families in poverty. The pay is pretty good because the working conditions are terrible, and they otherwise wouldnt be able to retain any staff. It’s about 19-21 residents to 1 CNA. But a lot of these are not easy residents.

I got a job here because I was originally going to go to nursing school, but working here made me quickly realize I don’t want to work in healthcare. I have one year left till I finish my degree in an unrelated field.

Anywho, our facility is pretty bare bones as to what it provides for residents. They do not provide wet wipes for bowl movements and cleaning, just scratchy old reusable wash cloths. All of the other CNAs buy them out of their own money for the residents, because they are really essential.

To explain, we don’t have enough staff to properly turn people and get people out of bed. A lot of our patients are obese and require a hoyer, which is legally retired to have two people to use, and we just can’t spare the staff to get them out of bed most of the time. This causes skin breakdowns on their bottoms. The skin breakdown is worsened by the rough rags, which turns into bedsores. Which are damaged worse by the rough rags. It’s a downhill cycle.

Recently one of our admins did a report, and it came out that patients on the hall I work on have more bedsores and worse ones that other halls. Side note, my hall also has more morbidly obese people than any other hall.

It was very quickly determined by the two nurses that it’s probably because I use the facility issued rags, rather than buying my own wet wipes, and because I have more patients that aren’t getting turned because I have no one to help me.

Our admin started shaming me for not buying wipes for my patients. The other CNAs also all think it’s wrong of me to refuse to buy them. However one of the nurses told the admin lady that she should be the one buying them, seeing as she makes 4x as much as I do, which shut her up pretty quickly.

AITAH? I know it sucks for the residents but I just don’t feel like it’s my responsibility to buy things for them, and I don’t feel like it’s fair for other staff to even encourage me to do so.