on call for nursing issues

[txnursegiggles]

Our ADON was being called CONSTANTLY for nursing issues. Call offs, incidents, admissions, ect. Our DON is not available some days due to religious beliefs. A schedule was recently put into place where nursing department heads and supervisors were placed "on call" from Friday evening through Monday morning to help out the ADON.

This is a new thing and I've only had one weekend, my next one is scheduled in a few weeks. I slept HORRIBLY due to the calls/texts. It really made me feel for the ADON but... All of us (on the schedule) are paid hourly and receive no pay for handling the nursing issues on our weekend. In your opinion, is this appropriate?

[systoly]

maybe you need to develope some religious beliefs

i think the keyword here is schedule

if your scheduled for work you can expect compensation

there is also room for staff training and eliminating those calls that you cannot or have not to do

anything about at that very time

call offs can be handled on site

reportable incidents can be reported by the next supervisor

you do have 8 hour RN coverage a day, right?

or is it ALF?

[noc4senuf]

I have seen staff compensated for being on-call in some buildings and in others they are not. Also, some buildings where just the management staff in the nursing dept rotate call and most recently where every nurse in the building takes a one day call rotation. What works for one building, does not work for another. Training the staff to handle staffing and other issues that come up is key. Also, there are some companies that expect staff to call nursing management for each hospitalization and death when it happens. Reportable incidents are different by state. Some need to be reported ASAP due to the time requirements you have before a report goes to the state.

Overall, on-call needs to be split amongst as many people as possible to prevent burnout in just the DON and ADON.

[Mn nurse 22]

The department of labor and industry has a lot of resources to help decide if you should be compensated for on-call work. Basically if you can't get x hrs of interrupted sleep, if the calls interfere significantly with your home life then it might be appropriate to get compensated. They have lots of specific examples that you can usually find one that is similar to your situation