"Flex" Competition Ideas

Partly due to budget and partly due to a lower census during the summer, our ED supervisors have been encouraging staff to "flex" whenever possible. Not sure if other EDs do this, but for us it means voluntarily leaving a few hours early and using your PTO to fill in the extra time on your paycheck. I am a huge fan of this because it means I get extra sleep and management loves this because it saves them money!

On some nights it can get pretty darn boring when we have tons of staff and only a few patients in the dept. So, recently there have been a couple people on each shift who volunteer to be flexed. We have come up with creative ways to determine who should get to flex and go home early. Our solution has been to have some sort of competition.

It's a blast! Last week we had a couple ideas thrown out there. One was to have a dance-off. That, however, can be rather subjective. The next idea, submitted by our charge that night, was to see who could get their pulse ox the lowest. Weren't really feeling that one either. What we decided on was to see who could eat 6 saltine crackers in 1 minute without any water. By the way, this idea was given to us by one of our docs. So the three of us who all wanted to go home, sat down with our respective emesis basins filled with 6 unwrapped saltine crackers ready to go. We had quite an audience surrounding us including our charge and 2 docs. The clock started and we were off! The only male in the competition quickly shoved all 6 crackers in his mouth as another female and I methodically ate one by one. The time was up and even though the male nurse had them all in his mouth, he was unable to swallow anything and began spewing sawdust-like cracker particles all over the nurse's station. No winner. Then it was announced that the first person to eat all the crackers would get to go home. The other female nurse and I went at it eating the remaining crackers as fast as we could. She finished, then I finished, and the male nurse had yet to make any progress. This contest was amazing! So much fun!

Last night was another slow night. Again there were multiple nurses that wanted to flex. After a few ideas had been thrown around, including who could start an IV on themselves first, we decided on first to finish a lap around the dept on a rolling stool. Absolutely hysterical!

Since this has been so much fun, we have decided that a little friendly competition will now be the deciding factor in who gets to flex off the night shift from now on. We need some help though. We need more ideas for competitions. So I'm asking for any input you could provide. And as a fellow ED nurse, I'm sure you know just how crazy a breed we are, so any idea is welcome - no matter how ridiculous!

Thanks in advance!