When state surveyors attack!

This post is not for the weak hearted, state regulatory surveying is involoved!

After a battle of the Supervisor this week with another co-worker, I finally won the title, "Tour Guide to the State Survey Team".  Gosh I'm damned proud!

Until I was notified by my boss that instead of walking through my little site in Paonia on Friday, it was gonna be today!

For any of you who aren't in healthcare, and don't know wtf I'm talking about, I'll do a fill in:

Every year, nursing homes, and apparently the program I work for, called PACE, get the pleasure of escorting around a team of state and federal surveyors that come to see that we're doing everything per the REGULATIONS.  Because we're funded by Medicare/Medicaid.

You know, they come to make sure we lock up all the dangerous chemicals to participants don't think they're Kool Aid, they make sure that every time we think about a participant it's charted, and they make sure that we don't have expired foods in the kitchen, and on, and on, and on.  Ad nauseum.

I think the first thing I said upon hearing I didn't have one more day to hide the bodies of onerous participants was

And not only was it today, but I had to have the surveyors follow me to the site because they are all from Denver and don't know where it is exactly that they are going to to survey.  They had to follow me for 20 miles, driving 5 miles under the speed limit because when I went the speed limit, they started falling behind.

Now, it wasn't as bad as a survey in a nursing home, where they leave and your butt hurts, but a couple of them were these guys:


Very contrary.

I felt like a bug under a microscope...nope, I felt more like this:



And I definitely repeated myself...

Fortunately for me, my non-committal grunts and yes and no answers seemed to satisfy, and we were done 45 agonizing minutes later.

Whew!

Now we just wait and see how many times they quoted me saying, "Um", in their report....



Remember, it's just a ride.