Hours of work and sleep time

[mirn]

Just wondering how many consecutive hours PACU nurses (scheduled, on-call, or combination) are required to work in a 24 hour period before the hospital must allow you sleep time. Also, if this happens, how is calling in another nurse handled? Are there backup on call nurses, or does ICU handle the recoveries? Also, after working, how much sleep time is the hospital required to give you? Another question is, how are non-emergent cases handled after hours(if your PACU works only on-call at night?) Are they doing only emergent surgeries? And how closely do they monitor the surgeon's "emergent" cases off shift? Just wondering, as some new issues are arising in our PACU...Hope you can help...thanks!

[capa]

We are scheduled on call after working a 8 or 12 hour shift. If we work more t han 4 hours after 11 p.m. we are allowed to take the next day off and the manager will call in a prn nurse or get someone to stay over. Sometimes 2 PACU nurses will stay out all night and then coverage the next day could suffer but we have a lot of prn nurses right now. It is up to the nurse to decide if she wants to come in later in day to make up her hours or not. Our hospital schedules day and night, not all night cases are emergency. Many times the on call nurses come in to finish the schedule. Our problem is not the number of consecutive number of hours worked but the number of days a week you might be on night call. Even if you are off the next day, you still seem to lose hours and it affects what you do in the hours you are off between working and maybe coming back in on call. We do get time and a half for coming back in at 11 which is helpful.