calling all hospice nurses!

bumping to the top.

What are the hours you work? Do you set your own schedule? Do you get to choose days or nights, or is it a rotating schedule ea. month, with a mix of days and nights? Please respond. Tell me about your work schedule.

I work M-F 8-5. I set up my own visits with my patients. Some days I work 8 hr, some days I work 10...and some days I work 2 or 3. It depends on my caseload. I try to cram most of my visits in the beginning of the week so that at the end I am doing only prn visits. We don't have a choice of hours. Our in-patient facility has 8 and 12 hour shifts available and they can vary their schedules similar to a hospital.

I'm an admission nurse, I work 830-5pm M-F. We take turns taking call for admissions.. once every 5 weeks. Some days are longer.. some are shorter.. it all evens out though.

I work 8 to 5 pm with an hour lunch which I take most of the time. I have sat and sun off. We have full time on call nurses so I rarely do call. A lot of hospices especially small ones require case managers to take some call.

I have a baby so I work Tuesday, Thursday and every Saturday and Sunday 8am-4:30.I usually run over on the weekends.I plan on keeping this schedule until she goes to kindergarten.It works much better for me than 12 hour hospital shifts.I see my family for dinner.

OUR hospice has full and part time nurses. They generally work Mon - Friday 8:30 - 4:30. Some have cut their week and work longer hours. There is an on call nurse during the week 4:30pm until 8:30 am and they just hired a nurse to take call 4:30 Fri until 8:30 am Monday.

I only work Friday and Saturday nights (alternating) because I have a full time job as a medical editor/writer. I requested the nights as I love that shift in hospice. It's a great time to be able to talk to the patients who can't sleep, I've had wonderful teaching moments with family members who were sleeping over but not yet ready to go to bed. I can do my patient care without people walking in on us (visitors or other staff). It's a very peaceful time in hospice unless you have a pt in a pain or nausea crisis.

I work for a large Hospice in Phoenix, and as a case mgr, I work standard business hours (8-5), and take a lot of paperwork home. Because it's a large Hospice, they have enough staff to have nurses that only do admissions, other nurses only do nighttime triage, and other nurses only do off-hour visits. I've found that the smaller Hospice agencies have their nurses do EVERYTHING!!! Not fun...especially when you factor in all the paperwork involved.

The nursing philosophy of "If it isn't written down, you didn't do it" carries a lot of weight when you're out in the field and have the freedom we do...the paperwork is enormous. But, I can't think of a more rewarding field of nursing.