Endo unit needs your help

Theauthentic · Jan 18, 2009

what does the nurse manager think? what about assistants and aides?

core0 · Jan 18, 2009

Our unit needs some help. We are a busy unit already with approx.18-25 proc. a day, depending. Usually one - three Doctors doing procedures. We recently added a new Doctor to the mix and we have only one pre and one post nurse and things now get very hectic for them with patients flying in and out at them all day. management doesn't feel they need any extra help.... ( so so wrong) we ( us nurses) are thinking our pre-assessment paperwork is way to much, also the actual procedure paperwork as well too. We used to be part of surgery long back so we have adopted their paperwork as our own for some time... maybe some of this could be cut down... does anyone have any helpful suggestions ...

We had 12 chairs for three rooms. 2 for each room for pre and post. Each room had a nurse assigned for pre and each three chairs had a nurse assigned for post. This for ~45-55 procedures per day PP AEC. Each room had a nurse and there were two techs to help with biopsies and clean instruments/turn over rooms. There was also a charge and a resource nurse if I remember correctly. If you think about it you are doing a case every 15-30 minutes. Once the patient gets changed, you get an IV going, get the history, do the assessment, get the paperwork ready etc its time for the next one.

Bottom line Endoscopy centers cannot be run like day surgery. You need more nurses to get the patients in and out. You also need enough chairs to do this.

David Carpenter, PA-C

lpnQT25 · Jan 20, 2009

Thanks for your input. I totally agree with you... "we cannot be run like a surgery unit". Trouble is we are an endo unit located in a hospital setting so they treat us as such. They have told us posting patients should be recovered and out the door in less than 2 hours. Now with only one Dr. working and young healthy outpatients as my postee's who aren't sick, didn't get much sedation, have stable vitals, and aren't needy..... yes this can be possible. But this is not the norm for us. We quite often have to bring ICU patients down for a procedure and with minimal staff in the evening..... this is very stressful on the RN who is usually posting and running the desk and other such duties..... we have one nurses aide who washes scopes and takes the patients out or back to the floor, along with doing other duties and there is usually one or two rooms going with an RN in each and 1 LPN who swings to both with the DR.

This is in the evening with one DR. Day shift usually gets 1 more aide and 1 pre RN, and then an RN and LPN for each addition room that runs. As for what our Nurse manager thinks.... We don't need anymore staff. By the way she has just taken over our dept. 1 yr. prior so I think she needs to work the unit a few times to see how things flow to know what we go through. All our patients recover in gurneys and on more than one occassion we have run out of places to put people. I had mentioned the use of recliner chairs for some, but this went on deaf ears. Our unit really needs to have a staff meeting.... I am trying to gather as much info as possible before this to have as ideas to suggest to management. Thanks again & please keep them coming...