About medical-surgical units in the USA

[Woman_in_love]

Hello guys!

I apologize for the silly question, i am an Israeli trained nurse and therefore do not know exactly if the nature of medical-surgical unit in the USA is the same as that of what we call "internal medicine" unit in Israel.

I would like to know what kind of patients do you have (in Israel we had a large majority of elderly people there, older than like 65), what diseases you can see there etc.

Also is it a unit with high mortaility rate or not? Coz overseas we had many patients dying and it was so depressing. Sometimes there werent a shifts without having anyone die.

Are the nurses involved in the cleaning patients and changing their diapers( if there are immobile( or is it handled by someone else like nursing assistant?

I would really really appreciate to hear from you about this unit, any details or real life examples would be sooooooooo great.

I once again thank you.

Katerina

[schroeders_piano, RN]

It all depends on where you are working. I work Med/Surg in a small, community hospital. The patients we see range from people with pneumonia, CHF, COPD, Abd pain to fresh post-op patients such as hernia repairs, appendectomies, or other minor surgical procedures. My unit also has Ortho patients and Peds. The age of my patients range greatly. Sometimes I might have a 1 year old in one room and a 100 year old in the room next door.

As far as mortality rate goes, it just depends. There is the superstition in the USA that death comes in threes. Meaning if you have one patient die, 2 more will follow. Last week we had 2 deaths on our unit. This week we have had none so far.

In my unit the nurses do help with cleaning up patients etc. My hospital does utilize nurse assistants, but sometimes they are tied up with other patients and you handle the clean up. A lot of hospitals in the US only utilize 1 nurse assistant on night shift, so the RN and LPN staff help out as needed. Some hospitals don't use nurse assistants at all. Once again, it all just depends on where you are working. I hope this helps.

Schroeder

[Woman_in_love]

Thank you very much!

It did help

Hoping more people will share about their own hospitals as well:)

[meownsmile, BSN, RN]

My med/surg floor tend to keep to mostly surgicals,, we do however catch some overflow from the medical floor so far as COPD, pneumonia, elderly from LTC with dehydration etc. The difficulty is you cannot put a respiratory patient in with a fresh surgical as a rule. So if you are limited to the number of beds, you kind of have to keep it to what you specialize in, so there are beds available from one day to the next for that days surgicals.

We will pick up a pediatric patient occasionally if they are over 12yrs,, otherwise a real little one, they will open pediatrics and call in the nurse.

[Hopalong]

I work in a small rural hospital and our M/S census is usually in the mid-20's. Average is mostly elderly with pneumonia, COPD, IDDM. We also usually have 1-2 S/p hips or knees, 1-2 Peds pts.

Deaths - maybe an average of 1=2 a week, not so many that it really gets to you. We only have 1 or 2 code Blues (cardiac/respiratory arrest) a YEAR, we transfer a lot of our sicker pts rather quickly to a larger facility.

Hope this helps.