Blocking beds when understaffed

[Nurse Ratched]

Don't laugh - does anyone's facility do that? I left work today having already put in 24 hours this weekend and determined that it wouldn't be 32 (this is just supposed to be a PRN job now...) The oncoming shift was short a nurse. When informed of this by the house supervisor, I inquired whether we would then consider the remaining empty beds on our unit blocked since we had insufficient staff for the patients we already had. Nope.

(And, no - there's no union.) Just curious if anyone's facility allows for that type of contingency planning for short staffing.

[cindyln]

Boy I wish my hospital would block beds when staffing is low. No they just tell us to suck it up and drive on!

[Jaaaman]

Yes. We will block beds when short of nursing staff on a particular floor. However, if someone is discharged or transfered to another floor, then bed control will have an admission put in that empty bed. I have seen floors closed to low patient census, and the nurses there are floated to other floors in the hospital.

[SmilingBluEyes]

Well, neither place I work really allows for this. It is a rare day when we can tell the house supe NO more patients w/o additional staff and really GET anywhere. (it has only been successful once or twice). But then OB is always at the bottom of the food chain and we often get med/surg patients from other floors or directly from OR/ER ( they are female) when we have an empty bed. I need to brush up on my m/s skills, I s'pose. (I hate m/s frankly but no choice here).

Example: today, We had 2 empty bed left, all the rest were filled up with m/s patients. Even our actual labor beds. (we are LDR and Postpartum). And then we got a labor patient, leaving us ONE labor bed should any more labor patients come in. When they send us these patients, they always tell us they will be d/c in the a.m. but it never happens, creating a HUGE logjam in our bed assignments. Rarely do the docs get to making rounds til late afternoon/evening to discharge these people.

AH, yep it gets hairy and NO we don't get more nurses to handle it, even if the patients we get are a bit out of our area of expertise. Does not matter. We simply have to figure it out and suck it up. It is making me want to get out of OB and maybe hospital nursing altogether. After all, "A nurse is a nurse is a nurse", as the old, tired saying goes in the hospital arena.