PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — A Valley registered nurse has started her own private business helping patients and families navigate the confusion that sometimes comes along with getting sent home from the hospital.
AZFamily has reported a lot of medical facilities are not allowing visitors into hospitals due to COVID-19 precautions which can make it frustrating and challenging to figure out what to do for whoever will be tasked with caring of someone discharged from the hospital.
The paperwork alone can be overwhelming and hard to understand, the patient might not have been able to retain or remember all the instructions from hospital staff to tell whoever is taking care of them what to do, and it might be hard to get through the hospital phone line for clarification or to answer questions.
Jasmine Bhatti, RN, founded Navi Concierge Nurses, in February 2020. That was before the height of the pandemic and just before Governor Ducey issued executive orders to minimize the spread of COVID-19.
“I started it because working as a charge nurse at night, I’d realize people would call in and they would say ‘hey – I don’t know how to take care of myself – I don’t understand my discharge instructions, I can’t remember what the nurse told me to do… can you please help me?’ And so I realized there was just this gap for people who don’t qualify for home health… who just need a little extra assistance getting home and feeling comfortable and confident in caring for themselves,” explained Bhatti.
Bhatti, who also works at a major medical clinic in the Valley said in general, her colleagues at other hospitals are telling her patients, including surgery, mild COVID patients are getting discharged from the hospital a little faster than usual. If they can recover at home, she said hospital staff want to discharge these types of patients to make room for COVID patients with serious or life-threatening symptoms.
Navi Concierge Nurses is not an all-day at-home care service. It takes at least two hours for the RN you hire to interpret your discharge papers, contact your medical provider, and teach you or the family member tasked with caring for the patient what to do.
“Unlike traditional home health companies, what we do is really focus on patient education from a really holistic perspective. So we come into the house and we look at the environment, what’s happening, what nutrition is looking like,” explained Bhatti whose business is separate from her full-time RN job at a major Valley medical clinic.
Tiffany Cramer hired Bhatti after getting hip surgery and COVID-19 this summer. Her husband and one of her teenage kids caught COVID-19 too and she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t walk yet and wasn’t feeling well.
“Jasmine’s care was amazing,” explained Cramer. “The challenges that I ran into are getting the correct information and not getting too much information. I have found when I look online and try to get answers, you can find a lot of different things as to what you’re supposed to be doing. So I needed one person to come in and guide us to do what we needed to do to take care of ourselves,” she added.
Bhatti said the minimum cost is 2 hours for $250 dollars. So far, Navi Concierge Nurses doesn’t take insurance.
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