The place I work for wants to get rid of all phlebotomist and make nurses do lab draws. I work on a telly floor. This means many lab draws that get ordered all ..day.. long.... K+, Mg+, Troponin, PT. Not to mention nearly everyone on the floor has daily CBC, and Chemistry.
Honestly, I am thinking about leaving. We already have too many patients, and never enough staff. Often no nurse aids, so we do everything. It's total pt care with up to 6 telemetry patients. (Most of the time I feel like I work in acute care nursing home).
Does this sound reasonable to you? We aren't getting an increase in pay for the increase in work.
If we can do this on top of all our other patients (4:1) then I'm sure with prioritization others can make it work.
That's the key: 4:1. Try 6-8 to one and report back how easy all these additional tasks are when added to your already busy day or night. Unless the number of patients per nurse decreases to compensate for the extra work, this is just wrong.
I'm still in nursing school, but I'm a former phlebotomist. I'm SHOCKED that my program hasn't taught us phlebotomy (and I'm entering my final semester). I'm grateful that I know how to perform it, but only a few of us do! I hope to see the use of phlebs in hospitals in the future, so that RNs can focus on all of the other care that needs to be done, though it IS good for RNs to know how to perform phlebotomy, come a code/stat situation. However, if an RN doesn't perform it often enough, they likely CAN'T perform it in such a stressful situation, where someone likely has awful veins, and an IV would be a higher priority (at least you can generally draw labs from an IV start).
It's sad how many more tasks continue to be added to what nurses are expected to do, without better patient ratios.
As I've mentioned in other posts on here, where I used to work, night shift, we had 8-9 pts. No phlebotomists, our techs didn't do vitals or accuchecks. We did have RT, and we did have someone to do our EKGs though. But we made it work.
And seriously, where I am now, I've rarely seen my stat labs actually drawn stat if the phlebotomists do them. Usually, I'll do them myself, and they show up an hour later for the 'stat'. Timed studies? Forget it. However, as others have mentioned, they are awesome at what they do. They often find something where I haven't been able to.
OP, I do agree though that if you guys don't have techs or CNAs at all, that ratio is a bit intense.
Aurora77
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