admissions nurse

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I am looking for RNs who work in the hospitals who are familiar with and or worked as an admissions nurse. I am currently working on creating a position for our hospital and would like some input as to what works and what doesn't. We are a hospital with approx. 100 beds and we will be having 1 RN working the hours of 11-1930 as an admissions nurse Monday-Friday. Our plan is to have the RN based out of the ER and to start the admission process in the ER and then follow the patient to the inpatient unit to finish up the admitting work and then to transfer the care to a unit based RN. Direct admits would go to the apporpriate unit and the admissions nurse would come to the unit to admit the patient.

Anyone out there doing a similar process that you could make suggestions?

Thank You,

Julie RN-BSN

Hospital Coordinator

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Specializes in LTC, assisted living, med-surg, psych.

I work on a 38-bed med/surg unit, and I can tell you there is NO WAY that a single nurse can handle all the admissions that come in on an average weekday, especially if you have her running back and forth to & from the units. Admissions---particularly direct admits from home or MD office---take a LOT of time and paperwork; as a PRN/admissions nurse myself, I can get them done in about 45 mins. if everything runs smoothly, but even so, I can't do three or four at one time, and I'm certainly not expected to run these patients up to the floors from the ED.

I think this idea is totally unrealistic. One nurse can't possibly do it all.......I'm a pro at multi-tasking, but I have yet to discover how to split myself like an amoeba and be in two or three or four places all at once! If you set someone up like this, they are bound to fail.........this proposal needs to go back to the drawing board. :stone

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I am looking for RNs who work in the hospitals who are familiar with and or worked as an admissions nurse. I am currently working on creating a position for our hospital and would like some input as to what works and what doesn't. We are a hospital with approx. 100 beds and we will be having 1 RN working the hours of 11-1930 as an admissions nurse Monday-Friday. Our plan is to have the RN based out of the ER and to start the admission process in the ER and then follow the patient to the inpatient unit to finish up the admitting work and then to transfer the care to a unit based RN. Direct admits would go to the apporpriate unit and the admissions nurse would come to the unit to admit the patient.

Anyone out there doing a similar process that you could make suggestions?

Thank You,

Julie RN-BSN

Hospital Coordinator

I appreciate that you're trying to develop something to help nurses, but why just offer the help mostly to benefit the day shift, and only on weekdays? We're swamped 24/7.

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I appreciate that you're trying to develop something to help nurses, but why just offer the help mostly to benefit the day shift, and only on weekdays? We're swamped 24/7.

We have extracted all the data the majority of our admission come between 11 and 1930. That is why we are choosing these hours. We also need to keep this position FTE neutral.

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I work on a 38-bed med/surg unit, and I can tell you there is NO WAY that a single nurse can handle all the admissions that come in on an average weekday, especially if you have her running back and forth to & from the units. Admissions---particularly direct admits from home or MD office---take a LOT of time and paperwork; as a PRN/admissions nurse myself, I can get them done in about 45 mins. if everything runs smoothly, but even so, I can't do three or four at one time, and I'm certainly not expected to run these patients up to the floors from the ED.

I think this idea is totally unrealistic. One nurse can't possibly do it all.......I'm a pro at multi-tasking, but I have yet to discover how to split myself like an amoeba and be in two or three or four places all at once! If you set someone up like this, they are bound to fail.........this proposal needs to go back to the drawing board. :stone

Interesting comments..........we are not afraid of failure and we will be running rapid PDSAs with this project. Thanks for your response.

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We have extracted all the data the majority of our admission come between 11 and 1930. That is why we are choosing these hours. We also need to keep this position FTE neutral.

Well that's only logical. What I'm trying to say is that it's too bad that all shifts aren't benefitting from the extra help.

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I work on a 38-bed med/surg unit, and I can tell you there is NO WAY that a single nurse can handle all the admissions that come in on an average weekday, especially if you have her running back and forth to & from the units. Admissions---particularly direct admits from home or MD office---take a LOT of time and paperwork; as a PRN/admissions nurse myself, I can get them done in about 45 mins. if everything runs smoothly, but even so, I can't do three or four at one time, and I'm certainly not expected to run these patients up to the floors from the ED.

I think this idea is totally unrealistic. One nurse can't possibly do it all.......I'm a pro at multi-tasking, but I have yet to discover how to split myself like an amoeba and be in two or three or four places all at once! If you set someone up like this, they are bound to fail.........this proposal needs to go back to the drawing board. :stone

Well said. I have seen as many as 15 admits in a shift, on a 36 bed unit. How could one nurse ever admit them all?

ETA: This unit was in a 99 bed facility.

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I have to really encourage what you're doing in your 100 bed hospital!

Something you might want to look in to, enhansing your idea might be what I did at a 150 bed hospital. I'm a Travel Nurse and worked as a PRT.

Working a 12 hour shift, both shifts were covered. The PRT's responsibilities were to "work the hospital". The PRT was easily accessible to start IV's, place NG tubes, to float all units and help out when an RN was too swamped

as well as perform Admission Assessments.

The ER would call the PRT's phone number as soon as the MD determined the patient would be an admission, or the PRT may already know about the admission since rounding was done.

You can't know how relieved I always was when I worked the unit and was

given an admission at 1830 and discovered the patient had already been admitted. What a nice surprise!

There were also times when someone might need to go home ill. The PRT would cover for the nurse who had to leave. Of course at that point, the PRT's role changed and staff had to perform all their own tasks.

I have to tell you, this person worked closely with the DON, made it nice to be eyes and ears and assist with problem solving.

Your hospital is small enough to be able to do something like this.

Oh, PRT's made $3.00 more and hour as well as the night shift differential. There were 3 to 5 of us who did this and we rotated the position. When it wasn't our turn to be the PRT, we worked on a unit.

I enjoyed doing this so much.

Good Luck!

I am looking for RNs who work in the hospitals who are familiar with and or worked as an admissions nurse. I am currently working on creating a position for our hospital and would like some input as to what works and what doesn't. We are a hospital with approx. 100 beds and we will be having 1 RN working the hours of 11-1930 as an admissions nurse Monday-Friday. Our plan is to have the RN based out of the ER and to start the admission process in the ER and then follow the patient to the inpatient unit to finish up the admitting work and then to transfer the care to a unit based RN. Direct admits would go to the apporpriate unit and the admissions nurse would come to the unit to admit the patient.

Anyone out there doing a similar process that you could make suggestions?

Thank You,

Julie RN-BSN

Hospital Coordinator

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Specializes in Emergency, Trauma.

Our hospital has designated admission nurses- there are 2 nurses 24/7 who are stationed in the ER. They don't do direct admits, only those admitted through the ER. Although it may take other nurses a longer amount of time to do the admission paperwork, when you consider that this is what admission nurses do all day everyday, they've really streamlined the process and can do an admission in 15-20 minutes if need be. They don't follow the pt up to the unit- the paperwork is completed in the ER, and the ER nurse is still the one to call report and transfer the pt.

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I worked as an admissions nurse for awhile - as a floater between an 18-bed medical unit and an 18-bed surgical unit. If implemented well, I believe it is a great program but there need to be some clear guidelines as to what the admission nurse is expected to do. In my experience, I was expected to not only do admissions (direct and ER, they came over with not much done) but discharges and receive pts from OR to the surgical unit. Obviously it is not possible to do all of that...some of the charge nurses realized that and acted accordingly and some did not. There need to be guidelines for who is responsible for the things that the admission nurse absolutely cannot get to. There were days when I had two or three direct admits show up at once to the medical floor - I would be expected to do all of them! Plus the two units would get in squabbles about which floor I would go to. There were four of us total...some days there would be one of us on each of the units and some days only one for both.

On a couple of occasions when they were short-staffed I would be given a pt. assignment.

Still, I do think that with the right staffing and the right guidelines it can work.

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are you still looking for information on admission nurse?? would like to share info

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yes, I am still looking for info on admission nurse and would love to see your info.

Julie

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