assignments at infusion center

What we do is schedule our long infusions earlier in the day to get them going. These would include blood,IVIG,remicade and the like. Once you get them going it is then a matter of ramping their drugs up to tolerance and monitoring IV sites and monitoring for s/sx of hypersensitivity. The second problem you have is patients coming all at once. The key to making this work is how you schedule them and all RNs scheduling have to be on the same page. Before you make any appt estimate how long the entire visit will take and block out that time in that chair. so if you need 3 hours to infuse some IVIG....you put the pt in chair one and then block out chair one for 3 hours. you need a scheduling book that goes hr by hour so you can see at a glance how many pts you will have at any given time.
next you have to be very clear with patients about appt times,otherwise it can stress you out when they all arrive at the same time are seated and they are wondering why it is taking you so long. If a pt arrives to soon and you offer to seat them let them know they are early and they will have to wait. You can also ask pts to wait in a waiting room and return at their appt time. Do not feel bad about doing this....you need to control the work flow. The other thing you can do is to spread out the time consuming treatments throughout the week....you will have to play around a bit to find out what will work. For me chemotherapy can be intense and I do not like distractions. Is this is what you were looking for ?

We do about the same thing. Schedule the long infusions and blood in the am and the antibiotics in the pm.We set up one area just for injections,aranesp,neupogen,neulasta and such quick in and outs.
We had the same problem of them all showing up whenever, in the old world with 6 chairs this was how it was done but now in the new world with 30 chairs we have to schedule appts and as iluvivt said we nicely remind them that they are early and we might be able to work them in..Sometimes someone might have another appt in town and we try to accomadate them. Our receptionist tells them up front that they are early but I will let the nurses know you are here. They all wait in the lobby. Even if they came for a blood draw and tx based on the results we send them to the lobby for the wait time.