What's Going On Around The Country

[Caseyrnbsn]

Hello,

My name is Karen and I work in a local Community Hospital. We do approx. 800- 900 deliveries a year and have a level II nursery. We deliver in our facility gestational ages of 32 weeks and greater.We are a Birthing Suite with 10 LDRP units. A 2 bed post-op recovery unit and one antenatal testing room. We have 2 operating rooms on our unit which we do all our C-sections and PPTL in.All of our staff is cross trained to L/D - Post-partum - normal newborn- Level II nursery (except LPN's ) - and some of our staff our trained to assist surgically and be the OR scrub nurse ect... We find that it has been working out fairly well but when it gets busy you have the post-partum nurse covering L/D also. We all work together but occassionally we have up's and down's. We try to maintain a family centered maternity education and care. Response has been good and we have practiced like this for 6-7 yrs.

We have crossed trained our pediatric dept. to handle our post-partum overflow when increased census has occuured. The peds dept. is connected to OB and they care for all GYNE pts. and younger surgical pt.s if possible and all the kids. This has also worked out fairly well.

What are other OB units being run like? Any suggestions comments or questions please respond *** I'm really interested to know what's going on outside of my small corner of the world. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my posting

Bye Sincerely Karen.

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[Naomi, RN]

See the thread on OB triage for a lively listserv for perinatal nurses....

[MercyAngels]

The hospital I work at is beginning construction on a new facility for LDRP & nsy, but as it stands right now we have 19 LDRP's & 3 observation rooms(which have had deliveries in them!). We have a C/S room; supposed to be that we'll be doing sections in the new facility, but no more staff has been hired & we're cutting it thin now!! Our unit has been LDRP for about 2-3 years now; it was rocky at first, and there are still some nurses who do only postpartum (which makes it rather difficult sometimes for us "labor nurses"). On the whole, the cross-training went smoothly. With the exception of caring for labor pts, most of our nurses work LDRP, pediatrics, & the nsy (mostly well-baby, feeders/growers, no NICU(yet!!)). I'd been interested to hear more about your staffing ratios, and crosstraining, etc. Glad it's working out so well for your unit!!!