Lazy techs!!!!! - page 4

All CA's where I work are union. It's really a shame. I feel like ours are either REALLY good, or totally suck. There is no in between where I work.

I have never, and i really mean, NEVER, seen employees work harder at NOT working than I have at this job.

This, however, is with any occupation. I don't think it has anything to do with the "CA" title, more than it has to do with the person. People either take pride in doing a good job, or they don't. Period.

In my ER its more lazy nurses. We call these nurses "tech hogs". We generally have one tech to two nurses. If you are paired with a tech hog, you can pretty much count on not having any help for the rest of the night.

I've worked with a range of equipment from pretty nice and new and fancy to dinosaur-age and none of it has automatically dropped vitals in to the system. I'd love to have monitors that did that automaticaly, as I have heard of their existence before, but for now the ultimate responsibility to get vital signs in to the computer rests with me to do or delegate.

I'd rather get vitals myself anyway -- it provides a good opportunity reassessment my patient. Besides, a central monitor can't ask about pain, any new issues, etc. Also, the RR on those things is pretty unreliable unless the patient is holding absolutely still, and sometimes we don't have them on the cardiac leads, just the BP and pulse ox. I've never seen a system either that can put the vitals in the EMR, but I've heard rumors they exist. Probably an urban legend.

Wow. As a Tech, I understand three things. 1) If the RN or doc asks me for an ECG, I do it. 2) Every Chest Pain gets a STAT ECG on arrival to rule out cardiac cause and 3) I don't get to decide the "cause" of anything! Talk about work outside of your scope!

I'm a tech and I've been running my @ss off the past three weeks (more so than other times) because the town I live in swells from around 15,000 people to 150,000 people for the holidays. It's a resort town that also happens to be about 6,000' higher than were most of our guests come from. So we see a lot of respiratory distress, syncope, dehydration and our 10+ ski resorts provide plenty of ortho trauma among everything else.

On Christmas day I was the only tech (during the holidays we staff up to two techs!) and I got worked, but in the end I took it as a bit of a right of passage. The veterans say that if you can survive the holidays in our small department, then you can make it.
The tech positions are coveted jobs here and pretty much everyone busts their butts because most people know that even if you've been working there for a couple years there are others who are hungrier than you are for a shot at a legitimate job in a resort town.

Refusing to run an EKG? I'd probably get canned on the spot. You gotta be kidding me. Some of the more experienced techs are open to offer their opinions but what they say by no means trumps what any RN says.

Our monitors will let you cross over the vitals into our charting program. It's lovely. When it works. I have to admit I do feel a little spoiled by it, especially when it lets me sit for 30 extra seconds instead of getting up to run and check a pressure or rhythm while documenting.