mandatory on call time

[valene]

We do about 550 deliveries a year. Administration has told us we have to come up with a plan to do all c/s despite or personnel on call already. (We do about 9 c/s a month) This is an immense undertaking with orientation and staffing. If we do not hire any other personnel, and 10 of our 19 nurses trained for this, we would each have 140 hours of on call a month. You must be able to be in the OR at work within 20 min. Bad enough if you are part time, but horrendous if you are full time. Any suggestions, comments, appreciated. If you take call for ob please post the specifics of your call. ie: hours/month, call pay, time obligation to get to work, how many del./ year, your units basic staffing. Your help is appreciated.

[Solo36]

Hi Valerie. I am the supervisor of a small L & D and nursery unit. We do about 130 deliveries/year. We have 2 nurses that are trained L & D nurses, myself being one of them. The other RN and I take call on a 7 off/7 on basis. WE end up with each around 220 hours/month of call. The hospital furnishes the beeper. We do not assist with c/s. We get the mother ready and the surgery crew comes in for the surgery. We have a 30 minute response time to show up after being called in. We do not have coverage at the hospital 24/7. We cover 12 hours M-F and are on call at night and on weekends. We only have 1 ob/gyn in town. The call pay at our hospital is $1.50/hr. Hope this helps some.

Lisa

[ohfeelyafundi]

Hey Valene!

We do about 360 deliveries a year and we don't have any mandatory on-call time. The idea was tossed around a little bit, but it got shot down quickly by our union negotiators. We have a pretty good group of nurses that will come in if the extra help is needed.

I definately agree with kday regarding getting PAID appropriately for all of that insane on-call time!!

Good Luck!

[bbnurse]

We have about 1050 deliveries a year. We have on call about 12-24 hrs a month each. We get a nominal 1.25/hr on call and have 30min or less to respond. We are NOT on call to cover the c-section room but we get pts ready and go as far as we can to get going on a crash and burn section.

We DO however get paid time and 1/2 for "callback" pay with all the shift diffs if called in. Our call time is voluntarily chosen to cover high time off, weak places in the schedule and/or high census projections. That means we sign up for the days we can arrange to be on call. If we can't cover it after we signed up, we have to arrange coverage or be counted absent. Trading call works well for us. We can use the beeper provided or our own cell phones to allow us to wander around in our lives.

It is not the practice in the rest of the hospital to do call this way but this works well for us. We couldn't do it in addition to working full time every single week. Patient care would suffer.

Fight the concept. And good luck.

[chrisnat-rn]

We have 80-100 deliveries per month and have no call. We make our own schedule and the staff works together to cover any holes that might be in the schedule before it comes out. We do however get put on call for low census days and we make $!.50/hr then.

[rdhdnrs]

We have mandatory call. If we're busy, we can be called in, but they have to call us by 0545 for the am shift or we're off the hook. Sometimes we volunteer to take call if they don't need us at the moment, but we only get $1.00/hr for that. We sign up for this upstaffing once a pay period (once every two weeks).

Lisa