Floor nurses

Nurses General Nursing

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How often do you work without ANY nursing assistants/techs?

A friend at a nearby facility said 2 of the CNAs that worked her usual schedule quit and they have since (approx a week) had no assistants at night often times unless there was an extra to be pulled from another floor...this is a hospital. I'm sure it must be rough!!!

Specializes in Med/Surg Nurse.

"Our aides tend to be nursing students who spend more time trying to watch procedures and study than to do aide work. Some of them have already made sure we know that they are too good to work the floor....most plan to be nurse anesthetists or ARNP's"

We have a few Aides/nursing students that sound similar to the above statement - I've found that it's not even worth the time to explain to them that there are steps involved to get into these advanced nursing programs that will most likely involve providing bedside nursing care. It's great to have a plan but sometimes life does get in the way of our mapped out future.

As for our aides, I appreciate most of them - I find that they can either make or break my shift. There are many that are awesome at their job but we also have a couple that spend more time on their cell phone and taking extended breaks than working. Considering how poorly they are paid I am grateful that we have any on our floor at all.

I work on a 21 bed post-surgical/telemetry unit and our night shift CNA transferred to another floor about 3 months ago and the CNA that replaced her quit about a month later so we've had no CNA on nights for about 2 months now. When there is one scheduled, he/she is usually pulled to another unit or pulled to sit with a confused patient. And we usually only have 1 CNA on daylight and evenings. Our manager seems to have a way of running our CNA's off....:uhoh3:

Specializes in Med/surg, rural CCU.

They phased out CNA's where I work years ago.. before I even started. We work without any assistance.. but have lower nurse/patient ratios. I think it works better overall. We do all the cares on our patient's. We sometimes work with LPN/RN teams... where the LPN does primarily oral meds and cares (cares are shared though) and RN does assessments and IV meds.

They phased out CNA's where I work years ago.. before I even started. We work without any assistance.. but have lower nurse/patient ratios. I think it works better overall. We do all the cares on our patient's. We sometimes work with LPN/RN teams... where the LPN does primarily oral meds and cares (cares are shared though) and RN does assessments and IV meds.

I think I'd actually prefer this if we had fewer patients. The biggest challenge for us in the ED, however, is transporting patients being admitted to the hospital and having to be gone from the department so often for that period of time. Techs are our only means of transport in addition to everything else. We also have no tube system in our hospital so we have to walk all of our samples to the lab ourselves if we have no tech. Neither of these of which I mind doing, but it does take much time away from other patients when I have to do all of this running by myself.

Specializes in pulm/cardiology pcu, surgical onc.

On our floor we get one CNA for 24 pts but if they are short in the house and need a sitter she gets pulled. As busy as it is the aide can barely manage to get all the vs, help w call lights and some with turning so basically we do primary nursing. Like another post said, you do see your pts more and really know what's going on, not second hand info that sometimes get skewed.

I work on an 18 bed med-surg/ tele floor. We normally have 1 RN and 2 LPNs on both shifts. So we each have 6 patients with no support staff or support staff that is only supporting their texting addiction. The level of acuity varies with each patient since we can rarely get someone moved to our small icu when we need to. It's normal for the RN to have blood hanging on more than two patients at a time. The RN is also responsible for signing off on the assessments done by the LPN, all the IV pushes and all the chart checks plus her or his own charting, medication pass and patient care. They say patient satisfaction scores need to come up but refuse to give us help to provide the quality of care patients want, need and deserve.

I work primarily med/surg and we do not have care aids (here they are called RCAs or LTCAs) as part of our daily staffing. On days we work in RN/LPN teams where each nurse does primary care for half the team (between 3 to 5 patients) based on acuity.

On nights we do primary care for 7 or 8 patients -- some cared for by RNs, some by LPNs. Still no aids.

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