Floating

We go to the PICU and the peds Cardiac ICU. They try to give us babies (babies meaning

Wrong thread

Actually, now that you said that, we do get floated to ICU to cover children 1 year and under. Luckily that doesn't happen often, but no one is happy about it when it does.

We floated to PICU and pediatrics. I was one of the few that would flat out refuse to take the 15 year old contracted CP kids needing full care. As I'd never worked with a patient older than a NICU baby, and had no training in PALS or ACLS, I just simply wasn't willing to risk the patient's health nor my career by accepting assignments I knew I was unqualified to take.

One particularly ignorant manager met that resistance with "Duh, didn't you go to nursing school?", which didn't really go over too well when I addressed it to the CNO. Also got the chance to tell a particularly ignorant house supervisor that I was not, as a floater to PICU, ever going to be first admit until SHE could float to the NICU and admit a 24 weeker.

I hated floating.

I remember one occasion when the dummies got all google-eyed when I told them I wouldn't accept the 3 teenaged CPrs, and that if they didn't have any babies, I'd have to just go home.

"We have babies, but they're all on vents and oscillators!!!!"

Hello, genius, I work with vents and oscillators and JETs every day, on 400-500 gram babies. Don't you think your vented baby would be a better assignment for me than those kids that are old enough to vote?

We go to peds, PICU and the nurseries. We don't take any kids over one year old unless we are comfortable with it. I don't mind toddlers or vented kids in PICU since Prn'd there. But if I don't know something I ask!

We can sometimes go to mother/baby but we don't do anything with the moms. We will either act as an admission nurse for the babies or take a handful of babies out of their couplets and a MB nurse will care for the moms. The latter is not ideal and only happens if MB is in a big pinch.

We also go to Peds, but that is because we use their unit as sort of an overflow nursery for our NAS babies when we can. There is a children's hospital right down the road, so our little Peds unit doesn't see much action...a lot of times if we don't have any NAS babies out there, the unit can't stay open. It's very rare for us to actually go to either one of those units, we usually stay put.

We have what we call a float nurse within the unit, who does not have an assignment and is available to help with admissions, discharges, deliveries, general busyness etc. Thats what pops into my mind when "floating" is mentioned lol

I float to Peds and PICU when our census is low and their census is high. This happened at least once a week (sometimes twice) between January and April. They try to limit the age of patients I take to 18 months.

As an every now and then kind of thing I don't mind. It is nice to get babies that are at the age where they can smile and interact. On the other hand, once they get stranger anxiety it is kind of a bummer having the baby who screams every time you walk into a room.

Newborn nursery and peds...that's it for us.