labor nurse circulating for C-sections

My experience was in a high risk L&D, we did 3500 to 5000 births/yr. The L&D nurse circulated, we employed our own scrub techs, the OB surgical suites were part of our department, NICU provided the infant care, mom and baby went to recovery together accompanied by the labor nurse, although there was an RN assigned to the recovery room as well and the labor nurse would return to the unit when her documentation was completed (she often would have some loose ends to tie up with unscheduled CS). After the post op recovery the mom and baby would return to the OB room where they would complete their post delivery care in their original room with their original nurse (when possible) until discharge. That hospital moved away from the concept of seperate nurses and units for labor and postpartum back in the 80s and built a completely new facility to accomodate the "one room" philosophy for care of the OB patient. It was a huge community success and the nurses learned to enjoy it as well. Scheduled CS had dedicated circulating and scrub staff...that was their job for the day...just OR...that was also why there was a dedicated RN for OB PACU. Post op the scheduled moms and babies were sent to rooms which were designed just for routine PP care...no labor or delivery amenities. All labor nurses were trained in PP care...some nurses were trained only in PP but the majority were cross trained. The labor and delivery trained nurses also cared for the "high risk" prenatal women...they were housed on an adjacent unit with quick access to the delivery and surgical suites.

where I am in Florida we do about 1700 deliveries a year. We circulate our own c/s and recover them as well. HOWEVER, we follow the NRP guidelines and have one person JUST for the baby. Perhaps this could be implemented in your facility. So for a vaginal delivery we have the labor nurse and a nurse for the baby at delivery. For all c/s we have the circulator, an RT, a nurse for the baby (always a nursery nurse) and the neonatologist. It is still sometimes difficult to have been the labor nurse, circulator and recovery nurse. Usually this isn't necessary but at times it is. The last thing is in Recovery we follow the OR standards and have two staff in recovery when recovering a patient.

We do, but we also have our own OR.

Where I work we do about 250-350 deliveries a month right now. We circulate for all of our c/s's, scheduled and unscheduled. We have a dedicated scrub tech who sometimes acts as a HUC as well. We always bring in a Neo for the delivery and someone from nursery comes as well to assist the Neo. I love circulating in the OR, I originally wanted to be an OR RN, but discovered L&D while in school and I was hooked. Now I get the best of both worlds.

We either scrubbed or circulated CS. Then we would recover the patient. A nursery nurse came to take care of the baby.

Our hospital does about 400 deliveries/month and we circulate our own c/s but nursery comes to receive the baby and recover the baby in mom's LDR room where we recover her for 2-3 hrs until we all go to pp. we are baby friendly and the baby never leaves the mom's room unless for medical reasons.

We do not circulate. We go down to receive the baby and that is it. They are lying to you if they are telling you all hospitals are switching. We do the initial assessment on baby just like a regular delivery, but we sometimes do it in recovery with mom in the room if there are no other patients there. We do not care for mom until she comes back from recovery at which time she is on Duramorph protocol. We are a small hospital so we do it all (except circulate); antepartum, intrapartum, post-postpartum, and nursery, all on one unit. We do not have designated jobs like "postpartum nurse" or "labor nurse"; just depends on how we decide to split up our patients for the day.

Yes, I also know of a hospital where the OB nurses do not circulate. I am not sure if they recover mom or not, but they do receive the baby. From my understanding, they do not intend to change this practice in the near future.

As for the nurses having designated jobs at the hospital that I work at, they have their "usual" assignments such as triage, labor, postpartum, circulate, PACU, etc. However, they are all trained to do every job, and are switched up depending on patient need.