Heart Call Pay

[Galatea]

Hello, I am a O.R. nurse working in Northern Calif. at a hospital that does heart surgery. For the many years I have worked there, there has always been one of the four nurses on call every night who is a heart nurse specialist. We have four people on call for the very frequent possibility of there being two cases going on at once. Many time these cases are not heart cases, but the heart nurse has to come in anyway. If we get called for a general case for a few hours and then later have to come in for an emergency heart, we are usually 'fried' the next day. My question to the heart nurses out there is: How does your hospital handle speciality heart call? Do you have heart call only and what are you compensated?

Thank you, in advance, for your responses.

[poopsiebear]

I work in a teaching hospital in Philly, and the heart nurses/scrubs get paid $2 and hour for call and 1 1/2 when they get called in. We have enough heart RNs and scrubs that they take call about once every 10 days. However, when they are on call on the weekend, they take 24 hour call. We usually have 4 - 5 other staff on call besides heart call, so we don't call the heart nurses/scrubs to come in for non-heart cases.

When a heart RN/scrub is called in in the middle of the night to do a case, and the case goes past 2 a.m., he/she has the option to take the next day off but has to use vacation time to make up the hours. I have worked with a heart RN who has worked 16 hours the previous day on a weekend, and was offered a shorter day the following day so she could go home and rest.

[Galatea]

Thanks for the response. I am amazed to hear how little specialty nurses get compensated for being on call. The hospitals require that they be on call for emergency hearts, but $2 an hour is VERY little. And then to have to use your hard earned PTO to sleep and/or recover from the previous night---AMAZING!

After hearing similar responses from other forums I've joined, I am no longer surprised that there is a critical nursing shortage. This is a very stre$$ful and high tech career we work in and we $hould be more highly compen$ated ,if ho$pital$ want a modicum of retention.

[bjsmsn]

I work at a hospital that has two call teams on per night, a general call team that consists of 2 professionals and a heart call team that consists of 3 professionals. If a general call case requires a team of 3 members, one of the heart call team members is scheduled to be called in also. Everyone gets $3.00/hr to be on call, and time and a half if they have to come in. Heart call team members are on call every other week, a week at a time. General call team members are on call once or twice a week with the heart team whose week it is and one of that team covering that third call slot. We are rarely offered the next day off and it is not assumed that you will get it whether you work or not.

[zambezi, BSN, RN]

I believe that anyone on standby in our hospital gets $3.50 an hour and time and a half if called in. If the RN is on standby for >125 hrs in a quarter then 1.00 is added on...that is what our contract states...there are likely some added bonuses that I don't know about though since I don't work for any of these potential on-call positions...

[lenawa]

I am on the cardiac service for our OR. our staff is not technically cross trained, but we are frequently floated to other services to replace sick calls. every evening there are 2 staff that work from 11-7 PLUS 1 on call for General/ Plastics/ Vascular, 1 on call for ortho, 2 on call for neuro and 3 on call for cardiac. the policy at our hospital is there has to be 2 cardiac nurses to open a chest (tamponade etc...) and 3 if it is a pump case. we are paid the same on call pay as everyone else ($12 for every 8 hour unit we are on call plus minimum 4 hours at straight pay for call back, if we are there more than 4 hours, we get double time for the whole amount of time we are there), but tend to be on call more often and called in more often when we are on call. We used to staff the cardiac OR's until 1900h, but our manager recently added a 3-11 shift that 2 people work every day. although it sucks to have to work yet another shift, it is nice to actually get to go home at 7 instead of staying late because the case runs over (they usually seem to)

anyway, i am babbling

LEna

[heartscrub]

I work in a Northern California hospital. We have a dedicated heart team. We are an all RN team and have 3 nurses per room. We are a union hospital so.....our standby pay is $8/hr and 1 1/2 time if called in with a 3 hour guaranteed pay. We do not have specialty pay at this facility. We cover 3 rooms and have varying call coverage daily: 13 hours, 18 hours, and 24 hours depending on which team you are assigned.

Hope that this is of some assistance.