Cath Lab on call schedules?

Specialties Cardiac

Published

Hi, I'm a cath lab nurse in a relatively small lab. Our regular hours are 7a-330pm. We have 2 labs, but only run 1. We have 6 full time staff, 3 nurses and 3 xray techs. Currently we are in the process of training some, but when we are finished we are going to be on the call schedule of 2 weeks on 1 week off.

I was just wondering what other people do for on call schedules/schedules in general. Does anybody do 12 hour days 3x a week? I assume hospitals that got a lot of labs going take way less call but I just want to see what else is out there.

Also what is your time to be at the hospital when you do get paged in? We have 30 minutes which I believe is standard but I was wondering if anybody else has anything different.

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Specializes in critical care: cardiac cath lab/ER/ICU.

I too was wondering the same thing and was going to pose a similar question.

The cath lab I work at only has 1 lab. Small hospital. We have 2 RNs, 1 rad tech & 1 RCIS. Currently we have 2 cardiologists and we are on call Sun-Thurs, maybe 1-2 weekends a month (which puts us into 11 days straight on call.) We (the RNs) are also responsible for stress testing, and to help with any imaging needs (IVs, etc) - as well as float into ER and ICU to help.

We typically work 0700-1530.

Required to be at the hospital within 20 mins of getting paged. But - we also have the best DTB time in WA state :yes:

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We have 5 rooms, along with caths we do peripherals and EP/ablations. RN call is about 10 days a month, tech call is about 7.

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Specializes in Cath lab, acute, community.

We have 2 labs and are a fairly busy lab. We rotate with an EN and an RN on (or two RNs) each on call, and have an appropriate skill mix. It works out that we are on call about every 3rd weekend/weeknight. We do a lot of OT as it is, so sometimes it works out that we are doing a LOT of work when we have done OT and then have an on-call!

We have a 30 minutes call in time. So the staff member must remain within 30 minutes of the hospital. If this is not possible they have to arrange an on-call swap with someone. We are mostly called in on sunday and saturday days as we are also a neuro cath lab (we do cardiac, neuro and vascular) and if we coiled someone on the friday we need to do a spasm check on teh saturday and sunday.

Our hospital does not have an ER, so we don't get many emergency strokes or heart attacks.

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