[herephishy]

Does anyone use an admission assessment team for admitting ER or direct admits? We are exploring this as a possibility at our hospital. The idea is that (during peak admission times) a RN admits the patient, takes care of initial orders and then passes the patient off to the regular staff nurse. Seeing that it can be quite time consuming to admit a patient and we often hear complaints that it takes away from caring from other patients, we are considering this option. Does anyone do this? If so, which dept. do they work under, how is it going, does it save time, does the lack of continuity play havoc? I have many other questions, if I could just find someone whose hospital uses this type of system...Let me know...Thanks

[Tara]

A facilllity that I have worked at in the past used this process for a short time. It was abandoned as the admission nurse can only handle one admission at a time. The floor still ended up doing admissions. The admission nurse did an excellent job admitting the patients however, it took the admission nurse longer to admit than it took the floor nurses to admit. Most likely due to the admission nurse being passionate about her role and quite thorough. Maybe someone else has a better experience.

We have admission nurses at our facility. They work 11:30 am to 9 PM (peak time for admits). There are 2 nurses assigned to this assignment. These nurses carry a pager and float primarily within the med/surg, pediatric and telemetry units. The negative side of their role, is the nurses depend on them too much to do the admits, and then they "pile up" waiting to be admitted. Our nurses are good at what they do, are efficient and get them done in a timely manner. They also start IV's and they also do dischages. Like I said, the other nurses like them very well. I believe that we could utilize 1-2 more of them, but currently not in the budget to do so.