Alberta Health Services -- Let's Empty Emergency!!!

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Anybody here (other than myself) read the latest diktat?

Emergency is going to start moving their patients up to the units STAT! The Ambulances will be back on the street!

Great you think, until the message sinks in and you think about it.

Floor staff are getting shafted once again. We are to find beds in LTC, sub-acute, offer stretchers or chairs for care, or send them home! Discharges can now take place at any time on any shift.

It doesn't matter if we have enough staff on the floor to safely care for the extra patients, they just have to be out of Emerg to make the statistics look good.

All I can see from this is more verbal abuse from families and patients because the "nasty floor manager gave my 92yo mother the option of care on a stretcher in the tubroom or going home at 23:30".

Good times ahead!

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Specializes in geriatrics.

Nursing continues to be a disaster, and honestly, I don't see things improving anywhere anytime soon. It's very unfortunate for nurses and people trying to access care. This is why I never intend to work emerg or most of these floors. Never enough staff or resources. I remember running around looking for a blood pressure cuff and a thermometer upon receiving a new admission when I worked the medicine floor. Just insane. Most of the time, the patients they sent to us were barely stable, but they wanted them gone from emerg.

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Specializes in MPH Student Fall/14, Emergency, Research.

I heard that they plan to implement over-capacity protocols 24/7. The level of bandaidery boggles me. As if we keep patients in emerg because we want to. What this means, also, is more people discharged from emerg who borderline-should-be admitted....just so they can come back in worse shape... "for the metrics, you know"

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.

Sad to say, this won't really affect my unit because we've always been on over-capacity 24/7. Our 19 bed unit regularly has 20 or more patients admitted... sometimes as many as 23-24. We struggle to staff for 17 so the OT is unreal. We're seeing a dramatic rise in readmissions and rapid response calls. But somehow this is supposed to save money and fool the world into thinking that the problems with health care are being fixed. No. They're just being moved around so they're harder to identify. Wonderful.

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There is a huge legal sized paper document floating around the units.

Guess what one of the recommendations is????

Hire two more bedmanager!! Unreal.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.
:clown: :lol2: :jester: :bugeyes: :yeah: :madface: :banghead:
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Specializes in Home Care.

Remember playing badminton as a child? We'd bat the birdie back and forth and see how long we could keep it going before it hit the ground.

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And nothing is more fun than having "off-service" patients on your unit. Anybody remember how to do a bladder irrigation when you don't work urology????

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Specializes in Nephrology.

This all frustrates me no end, and I don't work on an inpatient unit. The inpatient unit associated with my clinic at one time had a small "Day Med" area where pts could go for monitoring post biopsy, IV meds, drsg changes on weekends, that kind of stuff. Well, a number of years ago that little area was closed because of nusing shortages. The other day I was over there to visit one of my pts, and that little Day Med area has been reconfigured to house four more inpatient beds, and there were two pts in the hallway on stretchers. And no, there has been no net increase in staff since they closed the Day Med area. The staff still there from when I left were telling me never to consider going back to inpatient nursing. I truly feel for the staff on the units. My family doctor works at another hospital here, I asked him how things are at his hospital and he told me it was really insane, almost to the point of scary. He said (he is such a nice guy) that he is trying to make sure he brings in something for the nurses every week so they know he appreciates how hard they are trying to take good care of everyone. But true, it is all about being able to say they have cut the wait time in energ down. Never let on what it means at other levels.

My mom is in a LTC facility, and they have been told that "over capacity protocols" means that even if they have no empty beds they can still be sent pts - again to be managed in the hallway or the TV room. I was appalled, how do you change someone's Attends and maintain any dignity for them in the hallway? Or guarantee that the gentleman in the TV room cofused wont' try to get out of bed? They have already converted a bunch of private rooms into semi-privates, "temporarily". That madde me laugh - I told my sister that there is no such thing as temporary in LTC. And these were not large rooms to begin with.

Most people have no idea how these protocols are being implemented anywhere other than emerg, and don't realize that by being sent to a unit sooner that doesn't have the staff they or their loved ones are being put at risk. Sad really.

I give lots of credit to the nurses working on the inpatient units - I don't know if I could do it any more. You guys make me proud to be a nurse every day.

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