I'm curious do you experience this too?

Nurses General Nursing

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The more nurses I speak to about this the more I hear about how long it takes to find stuff. Stuff like equipment, items from the store/stock room, finding information, keys, codes and the list goes on.

On one shift it took 35 minutes to find the bladder scanner because another ward didn't tell anyone that they took it to use on their ward. Drove me nuts! :no:

Is this happening to you too? Would you spend 10 minutes everyday or a shift just trying finding stuff?

You know I worked it out - did the math - if 12 nurses spent 10 minutes just looking for stuff that would = 1200 minutes (in one day on one ward). Then for a hospital of 20 wards and that's 24,000 minutes or 400 hours!

I don't know how long your shifts are but let's say that based on an 8 hour shift that would mean 400hrs = 50 nurses!

That's a crazy waste of resource and time!

Yes - its ridiculous. We constantly run out of the same things all the time - why can't stuff just be available? Sometimes we have to call multiple times for things to get brought up. I had a patient who needed a pad one time, and I ended up giving her the spare I had in my bag because she needed it and they still wouldn't bring us any! But my biggest peeve is that almost every time I go to get suctioning - one of the parts for the set up is not there - so in the middle of an acute situation I'm running to other units/empty rooms trying to find the parts - real safe. I probably spend at least 20 minutes of my day trying to find stuff!

Specializes in Pedi.

I am glad to not have to deal with this anymore but, when I worked in the hospital, probably at least an hour of a twelve hour shift was spent looking for supplies. I specifically recall a shift where I spent 90 minutes searching for a working thermometer. More than once we admitted a G-tube dependent patient to the floor in the middle of the night, called central supply to have a feeding pump sent up to the floor and got the response "there are none left in the hospital." So... we can spend how much money to advertise our absurdly high US News and World Report rankings but we can't invest in the equipment needed to FEED our patients? Nice.

Thanks for sharing & it seems you're not alone. There has to be a better way than this. I know I didn't sign up to nursing just to run around for stuff.

Specializes in adult psych, LTC/SNF, child psych.

Ugh, it's even more fun when you go in the supply room and bump into the supply clerk and ask them where something is and they look at you like you're crazy. It turns out someone told me the wrong name of a certain product, but she pointed in two different directions anyway. Why wouldn't you keep similar products together?

On another related note, all of the heparin and heparin syringes disappeared from my med cart between yesterday and today! I can only imagine there must have been a shortage somewhere else, but now what am *I* supposed to do?!

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