[pinktermite]

How has team nursing worked in your ER? We have a new system, which frankly sucks, where nurses are divided into two colors...blue and red, with one or more "float" nurses, and a nursing assistant if one is available. Does this work better than any other system you have tried? Or worse?

[rdaven]

I worked at Huntington in Pasadena, per deim, and they did team nursing. It all depends on weho is an your team. They had plenty of staff and it seemed to work well.

[lvn in busy er]

We use it in our ER, and it seems to work, although it is divided into A<B<C<D<E<F<G<H teams with a float Dr. to pick up fast track pt's. Each team has 3 nurses to one Dr. with an edtech to either one team if we are lucky or for two teams. Each team can only get 18 total pt's, and the 3 nurses break each other for lunches, unless we are slammed (almost all the time) and we are fortnate to have a float nurse.
As for the nurses we only are suppose to get 4 pt's at a time, although I have had up tp 9. Of course if one of your team members has a critical we as a team will absorb her other pt's. It is not a error free system, but it seems to work, AGAIN it all depends on what type of pt's you have on your team, how fast can we move them out, who is on your team, and do we have beds? are we closed on diversion? I believe there is no perfect system out there, but I prefer the team approach, I think our pt's like it too. ( according to our recent survey).. I hope this helps.

[traumaRUs]

Team nursing in the ER works as long as the team concept is fully enforced and understood. Its not pretty, if it doesn't work.

[klunruh]

We too have started a new team nursing system. We have three teams, yellow, green and red. The teams are assigned up to 7 rooms and have 2 nurses on them. The problem we are having is this is a change from a 4 room assignment, and we don't work as a team we just divide up the rooms like we did before. I was hoping for some ideas on how to help people work as a team....Any Ideas??

Kim

[klunruh]

I work in a 21 bed ER. We average about 120 patients a day. We recently switched from primary nursing to team nursing. THe team consists of 2 nurses. We don't seem to be grasping the team idea. As a group, we just divide up the rooms and call it good...Any ideas on ways to help us with grasping the team spirit??

Kim