anyone else having low unit census?

I think it is a trend. My hospital, and others in my area, are experiencing the same thing.

We just filled up after several weeks. Almost all the ICUs here were half empty!

yep, we've had 3 patients... census is sometimes very unpredictable. most of the ICU nurses had to float to TCU that night.

Were quite the opposite lately...Completely full Tele x2 units, Med Surg x2 units, and ICU...Looooong night

SF Bay area: we've been full for the past month, ICU, PCU, tele and med-surg

Akron, OH area: I'm a nursing student but I'm currently in my critical care rotation...and the census has been low! the other day we didn't even have enough patients for students (and making a nurse in the ICU have two students is a big no-no)

I'm also one of those Cleveland area RN's, and we've been having horribly low census in the hospital! I've been canceled 5 times in 3 weeks! We're all joking that we're keeping the public too healthy with all of our preventative medicine we promote! I hope it gets better soon!

Our census just picked up a few days ago and now we are full

Nope, we're the trauma center.

Drinking and driving is the flavor of the season so far. Ironically, a lot of them seem to be men in their forties and fifties, not just the youngsters who think they are invincible when they go out.

No, my hospital has been full to the capacity for the last few weeks, I mean every bed in a 1000 bed hospital is full and the ED is still extremely overcrowded. We are a level 1 Trauma teaching hospital so we get people from all over so maybe that's the reason we aren't seeing low census. Sorry to hear that others are being called off due to low census, especially in these economic times.

South of Boston here, I work in a 16 bed unit, we've been about 1/2 full lateley althought the rest of the hospital has been pretty full to the point we have med/surg patients because we can't move them out. That's a long night. Last summer I think I spent more days off than on. I hope it's a little better this year.

Two 20 bed units. One CVICU the other M/S ICU. Low census has been a

continuing problem for about a year. Some nights we are full, but half the unit

has turned into tele pts during the day and we ship them all out to tele.

Most of us have PRN jobs to keep our income up due to call offs during low census.