first week of night shift over...

and i just want to say that i cannot believe how busy night shift is!! these patients just do not sleep. there seems to be more paperwork than on day shift, with the MAR checks and plan of care evaluations and double assessment charting and two sets of I&Os.

I started my first day with only three patients to myself, the next i had four, and last night i had five. Of those five, one was a new admit, one had new onset chest pain at 3am, one had an HS blood sugar of 500ish and another was a pt with a psych history that had continuous auditory and visual hallucinations. It was a trip. I was on the phone with doctors all night. Most of them were butts : / but I have to kind of feel bad for them, I am sure they get phone calls all night long.

i am getting more comfortable in my skills, had a couple IV starts, a pt. with CAPD, a Pt. getting meds thru an NG, a pt. with a port-a-cath we were accessing for IV fluids and meds, pts on dopamine and cardizem drips.

all in hall i am happy to have my boards behind me and be an RN, even if i do have to work the graveyard shift : P thanks for all the tips from my last post.

See, we do earn our money, contrary to what the day shift says!

Congrats on getting through the first week. I love nights, and would never go to days.

~faith,

Timothy.

I, for the most part like being on third shift. It's the days following my 3 12 hour shifts in a row that are difficult. I have to nap a lot those days. My unit has some openings coming up soon on day shift and my husband wants me to move to 1st. I know it will be better for my family in the long run. And it will be nice in the summer to be able to spend all that time with my kids. I also have a job interview next Friday for homecare nursing. (Actually with four managers - yikes!) This will mean 5 8 hour shifts M-F, no weekends or holidays. Things are changing already and I've only been working there 8 months! Good luck to you!

Night shift is way busier than we get credit for. Just wait til you have to do first of the month changeover. At my facility, us night shifters work about 2 weeks on getting the MAR's and TAR's double checked and ready to go--then they get checked again the night they go into the books. And of course, those ngihts are the ones that everything else happens LOL. I love nights tho.

I work a day/night rotation, so I get to see both worlds of nursing. I hear day shifters complaining about night shifters, and visa versa. I just stand back and smile, because I know the world of both! I try to do my double checks and other "night shift" duties during the day, but a quite busy. Day or night, we run our tails off!

See, we do earn our money, contrary to what the day shift says!

:chuckle lmao! I do a mixture but spend the majority of my time of nights and I have to say I love it

I love working night shift also, but I agree it is WAY busier than day shift gives us credit for! I know that day shift may be more hectic, but they typically have more staff and less paperwork to compensate. I hear all the time that the day shift RNs comment that I am lucky to not have the workload they do. Meanwhile, during the day there are 8 RNs and at night there is only me!

Night shift is certainly much busier than day shift gives us credit for! We may not have as many visitors or docs rounding...but we still have plenty of paperwork with the MARs and lab sheets. Plus in the NICU, we draw most of the labs on nights and weigh the babies (which sometimes can be quite an ordeal). Lately, a lot of procedures seem to have been done on nights, too...like LP's, PICC line insertion, etc...and they can take up quite a bit of time...Also, when we're short staffed (which is most of the time), there are more people available to help on day shift - managers, volunteers, etc. These people just aren't there at night! But as crazy as nights can be, I don't see myself wanting to be a dayshift person anytime soon...

Sarah

I need to post a semi-rant here and see if this happens in any other hospitals between shifts. It seems as though dayshift thinks night shift nurses are lazy and sit on their butts all night long. When I don't know something in report and they ask me about it and I say, oh I didn't have time to look at the chart, it's as if they don't believe me. They come in miserable and with attitudes when and if they are left with something to do that, oh my gosh, wasn't done by me. They act like night shift does nothing when we are not ONLY the nurse, we are the aide, we're housekeeping, we're maintenance men, we're unit clerks, we're chart checking, MAR checking, rechecking things from the day before making sure THEY didn't miss anything. We do our own vitals on 6-7 patients. Assessments. Meds. Q2 hour turns. Incontinent checks. I&Os. Waitress and get new ice water and snacks and this and that. Honestly, there are some nights when my butt hits the chair barely long enough to do chart checks and MARs and then I am not starting to chart until 0730 when I am supposed to be out the door. I have more nights than not like that. I had a nurse follow me this morning who had a hissy fit because SHE had to do an accu check. It was my misunderstanding that this man was written down for 07-11-16-21 accu checks and he was really 06-12-18-24. I had done it at 0200 because he was a new admit. The aide was already done the morning accu checks so this nurse says oh I need her to do another. She couldn't find the aide so then came out and proceeded to stomp and throw the accu check machine and say "I guess I'M doing an accu check". Well I am so sorry I did not know that dayshift nurses are so precious they just can't dirty their hands doing a little old accu check. We do them at night, but I guess we are below dayshift. Oh and this is good too, our morning aides complain that they have too much work to do. Well labs and accu checks and vitals ARE in their job description. But now, night shift nurses need to start doing AM labs. Granted I do the picc lines and the hard sticks already and the 0600s, but doing all of the 0700 labs was not in our job description. We are already ripped off at night being short a nurse pretty much every night, and then most nights we don't even have a unit clerk. And we NEVER, have an aide. I really can't stand this hospital drama. I am not trying to offend anyone on dayshift I am just wondering is it like this everywhere? Sorry this was so long, wow I needed to rant. :angryfire

p.s. My hospital is owned by CHS (Community Health Systems). It is my understanding that they own about 75 hospitals in the US, anyone else work at one? They are so CHEAP and only care about money, not patient care. I can't stand it.

Don't know if you're familiar with the system in the UK but you're making a good case for the NHS!

I, like the majority of people in health in the UK work for the National Health Service although we're seeing more and more private sector enterprises creeping in. I have to say I'm of the opinion that as soon as you start to make a buck out of sick people then patient care is always gonna be secondary