Home health caseload

[Corkyme]

I work for a small rural home health and hospice agency. I started about 6 months ago. i currently have 18 patients- 14 home health and 4 hospice. I really like the work! But there is no back up. If your 18 patients are all twice a week then you make every visit. We do all the OASIS recerts discharge admissions etc on top of the individual visits ourselves. Is this the norm out there now? I've worked in HHC before but there was a definite hierachy - field nurses - who were out doing visits vs case managers who were more office based. We also have no dedicated on call staff. We cover call in a rotation after working all day-What is a " normal" caseload for nurses when they also cover all the on call and all the visits? I am supposed to stay under 40 hours a week but I almost never do. Even if I manage to see all my patients in 40 hours, being on call will put me over...I just dont know if Im not budgeting my time wisely or if this caseload is excessive.

[Libby1987]

On average we run 18-20 patients with a shared LVN amongst 3 RNs, all straight HH and in pretty consolidated territories, the overall service area is a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas. Some of our experienced HH RNs are comfortable with 25 patients. It can also depend on how many low frequency patients at any one time. Average of 5 visits per day, SOC and ROC count as 2 visits, recents count as 1.5. We have 1 night of call per month primarily for catheter patients.

[KalipsoRed21, BSN, RN]

I am 6 months in also, but I had never done home health before. Right now I have 10 on my case load but all the field nurses in my agency are case managers. We case manage a team of about 20. I have a lighter caseload because I am part time and because I 'float'. So often I am seeing my patients and 2-4 patient that another nurse is case managing a day. We have call on nights twice a month and then we are on call every 3rd weekend when it is our weekend to work. I find it difficult to keep up with...but in 10 years I have never had a nursing job that wasn't difficult to keep organized, that I didn't feel like I had more to do than I could actually get done, and that didn't consume some of my days off. That is why I only work part time now at any nursing job. I couldn't have a life and work full time in the hospital, in the ER, as a traveler ( although this was better than hospital/ER), as a coordinator, and now as a home health nurse.