Buyer's Remorse

[Xlorgguss]

Hi all. I was just interested in getting some feedback. I currently work on a pulmonary floor as a tech and every day I work we have nurses floated from other floors. They are brought from cardiac, ortho, General med surg, ICU, hospice/oncology, etc. I was just curious to see if this was sort of the norm for pulmonary floors. As I said I work as a tech (also a nursing student) and have become increasingly frustrated. On the tech side I am the only one on my floor schedule 3-11 regularly. Occasionally I will get one of the day techs when she does a double or a tech doing 11-7 and I'm typically left alone afterwards. If I do get help from another tech they are almost always floated from another unit (just like the nurses). This just seems completely unsustainable to me. I know that there might be managment issues or stuff behind the scenes that is not immediately obvious to me, but it seriously is giving me doubt. Do people not like pulmonary patients in general? We have a large base of "repeat offenders", the possibility of trachs or vents, sometimes very involved patients (vent, peg, foley, rectal tube, etc), sputum/secretions, sometimes very unstable patients (usually go to ICU), telemetry, etc. Can anyone offer insight as to whether this is normal and just to be expected or is this something more unique to a pulmonary unit or of this is just the reality of floor nursing?

[nutella, MSN, RN]

Yeah that is how floor nursing works nowadays. Staffing is often borderline and to fill bad gaps staff is floated.

There are never enough techs or if you have enough techs you can count on one of them hiding for most of the shift in some remote location, behind the curtain, taking one hour for a bed bath ... .

Don't get me wrong - I love being a nurse but I left traditional bedside nursing.

With a steady stream of new graduate nurses willing to work under "strange" conditions management is not really rewarded to change anything.

[Xlorgguss]

Yeah that is how floor nursing works nowadays. Staffing is often borderline and to fill bad gaps staff is floated.

There are never enough techs or if you have enough techs you can count on one of them hiding for most of the shift in some remote location, behind the curtain, taking one hour for a bed bath ... .

Don't get me wrong - I love being a nurse but I left traditional bedside nursing.

With a steady stream of new graduate nurses willing to work under "strange" conditions management is not really rewarded to change anything.

It's crazy. At a different hospital I worked at it wasn't like that. Now some of my fellow techs weren't great and I would occasionally be the only one but it was never always like that. At my current job we are "supposed" to have three techs so can complete all of our assigned tasks (q2 turns, q2/q4 vitals, q4 oral care, etc). Whenever I find out I am alone it seriously takes so much restraint not to walk out. Nobody can provide adequate care when there is only one tech on the floor. It's just crazy.

[roser13, ASN, RN]

To answer your question, no, this issue is most definitely not confined to pulmonary floors. It's all floors. And most specialties do have their "repeat offenders," so it's not that either. It's just an unfortunate reality of floor nursing today.