It’s not too late to get your favorite nurse, home health aide or therapist the perfect gift for Christmas.  We took an informal poll and here are the top five favorite gifts of all time for the foot soldiers on the front lines of home health and hospice care.

1. A deluxe Fix-a-Flat kit.  The standard kit which includes a very muscular specimen of a man is okay for most nurses but in order to accommodate the influx of men into the field of home health, the deluxe kit includes a Swedish Bikini Volley Ball Team player to serve refreshments while waiting for the vehicle to be restored to its fully operational state.
2. A insanely organized elf who prepares all documents, fixes computer glitches, reviews paperwork for signatures and listens intently without interruption when the field employee flashes out in traffic on his way to her six year old daughter’s T-ball game.
3. Two fully loaded syringes of Haldol.  One for the patient and one for the nurse, therapist or home health aide.
4. A HIPAA pass so the nurse can go to dinner with her friends and say, ‘You are NOT going to believe who I took care of today. Y’all should see him without his shirt on!  Wait!  you don’t want to.  I’m gonna tell you everything.  Let’s go get a table.’
5. A cellular and Wi-Fi signal blocker.  You can find one at Jammers Factory.  The key is to discreetly place it in range to allow your favorite nurse, therapist or aide to get some rest.  If they realize that it’s there, they will compulsively flip the switch off and back on again every three minutes.

Please note that this advice is not a substitution for a consultation with an attorney.  The legalities of offering major psychotropic pharmaceutical compounds without appropriate documentation of authority has been questioned in various courts of law.  Federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment, including devices that interfere with cellular and Personal Communication Services (PCS), police radar, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and wireless networking services (Wi-Fi). If you find a compulsively organized elf who is willing to ride along with your favorite nurse, consider increasing the number of syringes in suggestion 3 to 3.  A person who knowingly violates the HIPAA privacy rules shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 1 year, or both.  The severity of the penalty increases substantially if the intent of the disclosure was for commercial advantage. Not withstanding the low cost of room and board and free food in federal prisons, many health care workers find prison to be a career limiting choice of residences.