Counting the Pyxis bid

[Riseupandnurse]

A few months ago the hospital I work at started a new policy that all the Pyxises have to be counted at 0700 and 1900. Nobody can go home until the count is finished. Of course, what usually happens is report first, then count, because there has to be a nurse from oncoming and offgoing shifts counting together. It takes about 20 minutes. Tonight I found out the floor added a second Pyxis and that has to be counted too. It is very frustrating. I'm not sure why we have to do this. Does anybody else have to do this, and is there any way to move this along faster? You're virtually guaranteed you will be at least 30 minutes overshift now.

[rnmi2004]

So basically the hospital is paying their entire staff an extra 30 minutes of OT every shift? That is going to add up very quickly. Maybe once mgmt realizes how costly this is, they will change their minds.

[NICK-RN]

I Am An Agency Nurse Who Works In Multiple Settings. Counting Twice Per Day Is Pretty Standard.

[november17, ASN, RN]

We use an omnicell but we don't have to count it at the end of the shift. We just count it when we pass the med. The machine says, "There are 13 lorcet, is this correct?" And we say yes or no. If the count is off we just grab a witness and go from there. The only downside is the count will be wrong and we'll get a little letter from the manager about it... Believe me, none of the nurses on the floor have their hands in the candy jar though. Usually if the count is off there are one too many, not one too few. It will tell who the last person to access the drawer was though.

Funny story about it; One time I was in a super huge rush. I grabbed a pain medication, and had thought I hit "yes the count is correct" on the touchscreen. I missed, but had bumped the drawer closed with my leg. Once the drawer is closed you can't count, so the system just shuts down and acts like nothing was taken out. I thought, "screw it, I'm coming right back in here I'll fix it in a second when I pull out meds for this other patient." So I went on my merry way with the pain med. Patient care first, right?

When I came back in this float nurse was standing there in front of the omni with this look on her face, and she said, "Oh...my god...the count is short." She was quaking in fear. She said, "You were the last one in the drawer." I explained that I had taken it but had shut the door prematurely, thereby rendering the count off. She looked at me like I was lying through my teeth, left the room, grabbed the charge nurse and redid the count with the charge as the witness. I had to write a note to pharmacy over that ...

The funniest thing was that the med was ketorolac...lol.

Yea lady I was shootin up some NSAIDs on my bathroom break

side note: The omni makes us do a countback on saline flushes too.

[elizabells, BSN, RN]

They just reprogrammed our Pyxis so that you have to enter the count in yourself when you remove something; it doesn't just tell you the number with Yes or No options. If the count is not what the machine expects, it will prompt you to count again, so a slip of the finger on the touchscreen doesn't create a discrepancy.

[Riseupandnurse]

It wasn't so bad when the count could be done by two nurses on the same shift. We would try to make time an hour before shift change so that at least some of us could have a shot at getting out on time. I've been wondering why the offgoing charge couldn't count with a pharmacy tech 1/2 hour before shift change, anything other than the bottleneck we've got now. I'm sorry to keep whining. I just don't understand why it is that in nursing all changes and new policies create more work. Shouldn't there be someone somewhere who is looking at helping nurses streamline their work and cut out some nonessentials, if only to save some money? I really think that if nurses washed their patients' clothes JCAHO would mandate that we all use the model of wringer washer my grandma used to use. :icon_roll