Back-up call policy on weekends

[nursecoffee]

We are in the process of devising a policy to start having a back up call person on weekends. Looking for input from anyone working in a facility who has back up call. What guidelines do you use to call the second nurse in?

[Siss]

We used to use the nursing supervisor as our back up nurse when we came in on call, but we have gone to having two people on call and both come in, no matter what the case or how many.

[All4Seasons]

Like Siss,we always have two RNs on call -years ago,the PACU veteran nurses tell me,there would only be one of them on call at a time.

There are people here,though,who have mentioned working alone as the call nurse (I remember because one of them mentioned that her colleague was irritated that she had been called in). You may have to keep bumping your question up until you find a nurse who does call alone in her/his facility. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help.

[All4Seasons]

We used to use the nursing supervisor as our back up nurse when we came in on call, but we have gone to having two people on call and both come in, no matter what the case or how many.

The Nursing Supervisors in our facility have been renamed Administrative Coordinators -and one is not even an RN - in fact,he's never been a healthcare deliverer of any kind! That's a trend we hope burns out real fast!

[gentle_ben_RN, ASN]

We call in our backup at the oncall RN's discretion. If you have more than one case that you would cause you to have more than one patient in the PACU at once, then we call our backup. Usually the OR charge nurse tells us what the case load will be when we are called so we will no whether or not to use the back up RN. I've only been called in as a back up once due to a critical patient in the PACU without an available bed in ICU at the time. Hope this helps.

[azhiker96, BSN, RN]

Whoever is team lead makes the decision about calling in the call person. We decide based on how many patients we might have in PACU at a time so that we will meet ASPAN standards.