Administration at my hospital is planning to make us a "Universal Beds" hospital in a year or so. I work part-time on a med-surg unit, and the plans are to make more beds in the hospital telemetry-capable. On our 30-bed med-surg unit which has an oncology emphasis, we will have the capacity for 8 telemetry beds while our "sister" general med-surg unit will have an 18 bed capacity (out of 32 beds). We are all going to have to be cardiac monitor trained and ACLS certified as well as BLS certified. (On another note, I am also being sent to a mandatory 3-day course to learn chemotherapy administration the end of this year.)
Administration believes that the Universal Bed concept is much better for the patients and they've found that when a patient is transferred to another unit like telemetry, at least one day is added to their length of stay, so this should save the hospital money and be less of a disturbance for the patient and family to keep them in the same bed during their hospitalization. The staff has been told that their nurse to patient ratio will be reduced from 1:6 to 1:5. But my concern is that we have a LOT of part-time nurses and I'm wondering how we can be competent let alone proficient in reading monitors (and also administering chemotherapy on our unit) when we may possibly be assigned these patients infrequently? (If you don't use it, you lose it.)
I'd love to get feedback from anyone whose hospital has implemented this system or if they haven't, what you think about this concept. I would like to feel positive about all the changes, knowing that it sounds like they'll be better for the patients. But I'm feeling leary about all of this since, as a med-surg nurse, I often sort of feel like I'm a "Jack of all trades, master of none", and this is really threatening to make that feeling more pronounced. Also, I never was interested in telemetry; I just wanted to do med-surg, but it looks like those days will soon be in the past. (We're not even called med-surg anymore; we're now "Acute Care".)
