Re: Endo unit needs your help
Thanks for your input. I totally agree with you... "we cannot be run like a surgery unit". Trouble is we are an endo unit located in a hospital setting so they treat us as such. They have told us posting patients should be recovered and out the door in
less than 2 hours. Now with only one Dr. working and young healthy outpatients as my postee's who aren't sick, didn't get much sedation, have stable vitals, and aren't needy..... yes this can be possible. But this is not the norm for us. We quite often have to bring ICU patients down for a procedure and with minimal staff in the evening..... this is very stressful on the RN who is usually posting and running the desk and other such duties..... we have one nurses aide who washes scopes and takes the patients out or back to the floor, along with doing other duties and there is usually one or two rooms going with an RN in each and 1 LPN who swings to both with the DR.
This is in the evening with one DR. Day shift usually gets 1 more aide and 1 pre RN, and then an RN and LPN for each addition room that runs. As for what our Nurse manager thinks.... We don't need anymore staff. By the way she has just taken over our dept. 1 yr. prior so I think she needs to work the unit a few times to see how things flow to know what we go through. All our patients recover in gurneys and on more than one occassion we have run out of places to put people. I had mentioned the use of recliner chairs for some, but this went on deaf ears. Our unit really needs to have a staff meeting.... I am trying to gather as much info as possible before this to have as ideas to suggest to management. Thanks again & please keep them coming...
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