Home Health Nursing

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Specializes in Wound care, IV, Med/Surg.

I work in HHC in FLA and have some confusion about our on call procedure. Right now we rotate call between RNs and LPNs on weekends beginning Friday night at 5pm through Monday 8am. We have an on call nurse that does on call Monday through Thursday 5pm to 8am. She is off then Friday, Saturday and Sunday every weekend. Now having written this she works in the office and does not regularly see patients throughout the day. She takes physician calls and caregiver call all while inputting the OASIS D/C's. Now those of us that work the weekends have already worked a full 40 hour week +. I average seeing about 6-7 patients a day with travel up to 125 miles. Here's how our call breaks down: $75.00 for 24 hour call coverage, no day off during the week. Nurses are required to be available for those 24 hours to do all emergency calls. The nurses that work on the weekends with scheduled visits are paid either a per diem rate for those visits if they do not take a day off during the week or they are salary and have a day off during the week. Our supervisors are treating call as if it is just another day off for the nurse, we are a large office over 200 patients on census at any time. We average about 40-50 calls on Saturday alone. I am looking for someone who is willing to share what their call procedure is . My NEW branch manager has asked me to do some research and find a solutio to this prolem we have. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Sorry such a long post!

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Specializes in Wound care, IV, Med/Surg.

Thank you!

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Specializes in Hemodialysis, Home Health.

Ours is set up similar to yours. We rotate as well about every 5 weeks on average. We have one RN and one LPN sharing weekend call from Fri. to Monday. These nurses see all our "must see daily" pts., ie daily wound care and then any non-scheduled visits that come while on call. The primary nurse is the RN who will do any new/unexpected admissions, along with sharing the other scheduled dailies with the LPN. We get $60.00 for week end call, and $28.00 per visit ($5.00 more than non-call weekday visits). Admissions are also $5.00 more, or $65.00 for weekend admissions.

If it looks like the weekend call nurses will have a heavy schedule, our other nurses volunteer to pitch in and several other nurses will take one or two patients in their area where they live.. this really helps the weekend call nurses out a lot.

I now work in the office as well, but I check our weekend visits list on Fridays to see if those on call will need any help. I have a wrist fx. fixator pt who lives 5 miles from me, so I offered to pick her up today and tomorrow. Several other nurses have picked up a pt. or 2 where they live, so this has reduced the number of pts the call nurses will have to see.

We don't get a day off during the week either for pulling call, and it makes for a long week if you had a busy weekend.

Seems like ours isn't much different than yours, right? :)

Speaking of... I need to get ready to head down the road to change that fixator dressing....;)

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