rapid response team

We have been doing this for some time at our facility. We have several of us that do this and our nurses are the trained staff nurses and managers in our Critical Care Units. We have a designated phone that receives calls and whom ever is on call responds. If for some reason that nurse can not go due to her assignment--the charge nurse, another co-worker or our manager will go for us. It works well for the most part. But the nurse takes a routine assignment.

Cindy

Wow!!! Sounds like a great position. I do admit I am a little jealous.

I'm jealous too! What a sweet gig...

I would roam the floors and help with admits, IV starts and medications in between RRT calls.

Our RRT nurses don't take a pt assignment. If they're not on an RRT call, they round on the pts that got out of the unit in the past week, check progress with the nurse caring for them then, and usually help identify and correct any trends that would cause them to become a RRT pt and bounce back into the unit.

Wish that would work in our facility--too much of a time waste

Our RRT nurse does not take a pt assignment, and what we do is definitely NOT a waste of time. There are many things to do besides actual calls. For example, check on any patients transferred out of ICU within the last 24 hrs, this really helps because sometimes they need to go right back. We do a lot of education especially with newer nurses. We assist with STEMI patients in the ED and getting them to the cath lab. A stroke team is forming and I suspect we will be a part of that. Along with education, we help with basic skills such as a IV insertion or maybe a question about a chest tube. There are chart reviews and QA paperwork to be done on "down time." We make rounds on the floors and talk with the nurses about the more acute patients. Doctors who are not in house will ask us to check on a patient if they get a call from a floor nurse and need more info. We've even had a few family members call us to check on their loved one. Sometimes these don't fit into the technical criteria but it's another set of eyes and ears with ICU experience helping out with the patients.

Wow, you must have a big busy hospital. Our rrt's are few and far between. Our ICU nurse has a pt load and is assigned either rrt's or codes.
On codes, the ICU nurse pushes the meds. If needed, we also start the IV's or record.
On rrt's, there is an ICU nurse and a RRT. We check the pt out, call the doc, and decide if the patient should go to the unit.

Doris

If dedicated RRT nurse positions materialized at my facility there would be fist-fights in the halls over who would get them...as everyone would want it...luckily i'm a man so i could probably take out 1/2 the ladies i work with. The other half i'm not so sure...

At any rate, you are fortunate because this is a rare set-up. Vast majority of hospitals dont do it this way (for obvious reasons $$$). Most of them utilize the code-nurse/nurses from an ICU (who typically has at-least one other patient). Whatever you do on your 'downtime'...make sure you keep logs and stay visible and useful... because any administrator with any sort of fiscal/monetary sense would be gunning to cut this sweet job as RRTs that dont have dedicated nurses serve just as well...