Kiddie Time!

I had an interesting night, last night. There was some snow in our area, so there may have been several call offs, or it may just have been through my Nurse Manager's sometimes whimsical sense of scheduling, but except for our Charge Nurse (floated from a sister unit--i.e. same management, but different unit) and an LPN from our unit, on 11-7, we had one nurse with over 1 year experience (about 1.5 yr.) The rest of us were first-year nurses--three in stepdown and two on the floor.

All in all, it went pretty well. Census was down, so we all had fairly easy patient loads. One of my patients was a pretty busy one, but the other three were no problem. We had one patient early on who had to be moved to the ICU because the stepdown was full, but it wasn't for lack of nursing care (he had the experienced LPN). It blows my mind a little, though, to think what a debaucle this same staffing pattern could have been, a couple of months ago. Stuff got done, we worked together when we needed to, and nobody died. Woohoo! I wonder if the CN realized her team was almost all rookies...I'll have to point it out, next time I see her.

Anyway, it was kinda cool, being treated like real-life, grown up nurses, but I do hope we won't be running like this a lot.

Oh, now that I think of it, the other floor nurse has been with us less than a year, but was a nurse somewhere else for several months, so she wasn't a first-year, either. Still...