How small is your small rural hospital?

[Ted]

Hello. . .

Tonight I'm taking care of 12.5% of our hospital's population!!! Yep, I have one patient. He's quietly sleeping with a cardiac monitor reading normal sinus rhythm. By the way, tonight's patient census for the whole hospital is 8.

Yesterday, I took care of 25% of our hospital's population!!! Yep, had two patients. Last night's patient census was . . . eight.

The total potential bed occupancy including ER, ICU/CCU, Med/Surg, and Maternity is 32. Yep. . . we're a small rural hospital.

One night, several months ago, we had a whopping total hospital census of ONE! Yep that nurse took care of 100% of the hospital's population. :)

Just curious. How small is your small rural hospital? Feel free to provide your lowest hospital census if you want.

Happy Nursing!

Cheers,

Ted

[krusey]

Great guys! to have a hospital that had only one patient to care for. In the dim dark ages, had happened one Christmas day for 2 hours. However, have a 39 bed rural base hospital, who caters to the remote hospitals up to 10 beds.

Very busy, AE, Med/Surg, OT, Maternity, Paed, and General and Pallative. Have a great need for Midwives in this country town. Have too many babies, (must be something in the water!) When only a few patients on the ward, most hit the study books, we are 3 hours from a major city hospital. Takes Royal Flying Doctors Services up to 7 hours to retrieve a critical patient as they are often so busy themselves. Every case is done on severity of the illness/trauma. krusey

[KyRNBSN]

I'm not as rural as some of you but we have a 49 bed hospital with 6 of those as ER beds and 4 ICU beds. Anything more serious than a R/O MI is transferred. On the top floor of the hospital is an extended care facility which is not associated with the hospital. but we sometimes float there to help if they are short on staffing. Our OR has one suite and the same nurse works the OR everyday.. She takes all the OR call and is always available. our average census here lately has been less than 10. I worked christmas day and we had 4 patients.

I rather enjoy working here as opposed to some of the larger facilities. I've learned more about other departments than I Could have at any of the larger facilities and love the fact that I can train for ICU here when they actully have a patient. (usually the ICU holds overflow more than anything else.)

It's a great place!

[gr8nurse4u]

The last hospital I worked in was very small. 3 beds in the ER, 2 beds for "ICU", 1 bed suite for new a mother, and 20 beds med-surg. Yup, 23 beds total (on the floor)! Our lowest census would have been ZERO. Just an RN and LPN waiting for something to come into the ER door. Our average was between 6 to 14 patients. It was a great place to work if you didn't mind living 70 miles from the nearest McDonalds. (The nurses were excellent).

At night, one of the two doctors or one of the tow PA's was on-call ... They had to come to the ER (from home) for every ER patient and take calls about any of the inpatients needs.

Kimber