Boy I really fortunate after reading some of your posts. At our hospital, we built a patient care tower about 3 years ago. We went from a 28 bed unit to a 55 bed unit. We deal with ortho/neuro/trauma/general surgical/plastics/ and then of course the overflow medical patients also. The floor is set up in "pods" or "neighborhoods", each with 4-7 beds. The absolutely most our nurses have is 7 patients, and thank God that doesn't happen much anymore. We are almost at our wanted staffing- we had to do ALOT of hiring when we increased our unit. In the 4 pt. pods, it is usually an RN and an NA, sometimes, the NA will have to be split between 2 of the 4 pt. neighborhoods, but that is still really doable. With the 6 and 7 patient pods, we really like to have 2 RN's and an NA in those pods, one RN takes 4 pts., the other takes 3. We are also trying to have 2 RN's in our 6 pt. pods also. Usually they will not have an NA then. They will each have 3 patients and do primary nursing care. Our hospital has recently decided to eliminate LPN's, we still have a few left that are in RN school, so we usually place them where meds are the heaviest. I MUST tell the staff on our floor how fortunate and blessed we are. With the acuity of the patients these days, you need to have the RN knowledge and expertise to deal with these patients. The patients that we are taking care of on regular floors are the types of patients that were in the ICU's 19 years ago when I began nursing. KUDOS to all the ortho nurses, it is not an easy job!!
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