[fsaav]

I know this might be subjective, but how many births per year is considered busy, moderate, etc?

Thanks.

[eandgsma]

Well, I'd call our unit busy...we had over 8000 births in 2006. November 2007 numbers were close to 700 births.

I don't have anything to compare it to though.

-N

[Nurse2bNicole]

My unit is busy. We do about 400 births a month. I cannot even imagine what a unit that does 700 deliveries a month would be like though! That's not busy...that's insane!

[madwife2002]

We had over 6000 a year and it was busy

[Elvish]

We average 500-600/month. Adds to up 6000+ a year. I think we stay pretty busy. Of course you have the usual feast/famine syndrome, but it's overall reasonably steady.

[tntrn]

Busy is any unit when you have too much work and not enough staff to properly care for your patients and for yourselves. Our unit does 90-100 a month, but TONS of outpatient stuff, OB triage (flu, runny nose, but always pregnant) and the gyn surgeries. We run our tails off.

[rpbear]

I have worked on 2 L&D units, one did 600+ deliveries a month, the other does 100-150 deliveries a month. I feel 10X busier on the unit with less deliveries. We have less staff, we do overflow, we have AP's, we have PP's, we have way less rooms, so we are always doing the Pt. shuffle. "busy" is not about how many deliveries you do a month.

[fsaav]

Thank you for all of your replies. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the nurses themselves are less "busy" depending on how many births. The hospital where I will be working after graduation has approximately 3500 births per year and I just didn't know what that number meant in terms of what other hospitals do. It sounded like a lot to me, but after seeing what some of your hospitals are like I see that that's nothing!

[tntrn]

Originally Posted by rpbear

I have worked on 2 L&D units, one did 600+ deliveries a month, the other does 100-150 deliveries a month. I feel 10X busier on the unit with less deliveries. We have less staff, we do overflow, we have AP's, we have PP's, we have way less rooms, so we are always doing the Pt. shuffle. "busy" is not about how many deliveries you do a month.

And on the "quiet" days we get rewarded with floating, sometimes 2 or 3 at a time, to the medsurg unit, which is so poorly managed it's hard to describe. The fact that they even think that L & D nurses (some of us who haven't done MS in 30 years) are qualified to care for their patients is laughable and big topic where I work right now. If only the patients and families knew. Of course, I personally think they should be told...maybe there's a way to get fired, after all!

[canoehead]

I used to work a fairly sleepy OB unit, but without back up, so the nights I had 3 deliveries, plus caring ante and post partum, it took a fair amount of skill. I've also worked in a city ER where they had tons of ancillary staff, and was bored and frustrated because I wasn't able to do what needed to be done, and the patient waited. Keep your own temperament in mind when you look at the different job offers.