Hospitals with IV, or Vascular Access Teams

[Daniel1115]

I am interested in the direction of hospitals with IV Teams or Vascular Access. Size, makeup,(RN,LPN),services provided by team, status as to any redisign, and hospital bed size. I am interested in collecting data for a proposal. Our Vascular Access team has gone from 21 to 9 over the past 3 years. This seems to be the trend.

Thank You, Dan

[hummingbird1]

I have worked for IV teams on and off for the last 15 years. THis service is greatly appreciated by many staff RN and LPN"s who do not have the time to restart their own lines. I originally worked in CT and now I practice in the Seattle area. Many patients are undergoing chemotherapy who have poor peripheral access and somehow our team can manage them for the course of their treatments. I do alot of health teaching about ports, hickman, PICC lines, midlines and home IV therapy.

I work in a teaching facility with approx 400 beds. We work with 2-3 nurses on the day shift, 2 on evenings and 1 on nights. For a short period of time on evenings there is an overlap person to help cover the dinner break.

I see anywhere from 20-25 patients per day. THis may not seem like many to some of you, but considering it takes me approx 1 hour to place a PICC line, and then almost another 30 minutes to order CXR, follow up on the film and verify placement with Radiology. THis ends up taking almost 2.5 hours of my time. Sometimes I must pass this task on to an evening person, and now they need to follow up. Hope this helps.

[Zhakrin]

The hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has a large and well used IV team. most units will not start IV so they call the team, while other units have a policy of sticking thrice then calling in the team. Peds can be very hard to get IVs on so a team makes sense.

Check the web site and contact someone for info.

Zhakrin

[jmb]

I am an IV nurse and would love to find a job on an IV team. I live in Maine. How would I go about finding which hospitals have IV teams. Also, who manages those teams

[iv therapy]

We are an IV team for a 230 bed facility. There 2 RN's on days and 2 on evenings. There is no 11-7 coverage. Our duties include initiating IV sites, Rotation of sites q 72 hrs, PICC/Midline insertions, Chemotherapy administration, staff education, equipment evaluation and recommendations, Line recommendations, QI and troubleshooting. We also do all the central line lab draws in the house except the ICU where they do them. We are resource for the facility and we write the policies for IV Therapy. This is a service that the staff here like and want to keep and has been in place for many years.

[DanielMark]

My last place of employment utilized IV teams, about 435 bed teaching hospital. Of course, since I was a night shift supervisor I was expected and successful in starting IVs myself. Lots of times with difficult sticks we would have to page the flight RNs to obtain IV access, i.e., if they were not busy.

[lisaloulou]

I personally think PICCS are not used often enough. Each and every day I 'finally' get patients who have had every vein in their lower arms blown,extravasation of caustic chemicals etc. With 15 minutes and 1 (numbed) stick, they can get a line that will last the duration of the hospital stay and beyond if necessary. What a relief it must be for them and the nurses who have umpteen other patients to care for. No more sticking! what a concept.