Is there a line floating?

[applesxoranges]

So a place that I know about likes to float their ICU nurses. Apparently they are now floating them to specialty units such as OB, psych, and ER along with the standard stepdown and med-surg. Is there a line when it comes to floating? If the nurse is not specifically crosstrained in the charting style and does not have previous OB or psych experience, should they be forced to go to the specialty units to take on patients? One nurse was told that four post c-section patients were the same as med-surg patients (I do not think that they got the babies since four patients + babies seem like a lot, but I may be wrong and I do not know how many days post-op they were). The nurse supposedly was yelled at for trying to report it as unsafe since she never received crosstraining as an OB nurse nor did she have previous experience.

I would flip out if I was sent to work in OB or psych. Those two are specialty units.

[jalyc RN]

Not sure how it would work today, but in the 1980's as a new RN who had 10 years experience as an LPN in Critical Care Units and L&D, I had a written paper signed by HR and Evening supervisor that I floated ONLY to critical care units, never to the floor when I was hired.

Saved my butt a couple of times. I might get pulled to Respiratory ICU one night, Med-Surg ICU the next, and Telemetry the third night, but at least it kept me in the type of nursing I was used to.

(I would be pulled to their unit and the nurse from it would then be sent to the floor.)

I had a couple of bad experiences being pulled to peds and ortho with 20-40 patients and having no idea how to safely care for them, plus not being used to managing my time for that heavy of a load.

[applesxoranges, BSN, RN]

There is a line. As a medical-surgical nurse, I would refuse to float ICU, ED, L&D or NICU/nursery. Unless in those units they could find patients acceptable for me to care for, which means those patients probably don't belong in those areas anyway. If I were to float to cardiac or a telemetry floor, I still can't take patients with certain cardiac drips.

Unless you are competent with those kinds of patients, you shouldn't be floating there. ICU nurses are probably better equipped to float to a larger variety of areas, but that doesn't mean they are the best person to float to those units. I mean unless they have L&D or neonatal experience, then that wouldn't be somewhere I would expect them to go. They also may not feel comfortable taking six med surg patients. It's a different flow even though the patients are not as acute.

I'd be looking into your facility policy on floating. We also can't float any new nurses ( less than 6 months experience).

I quit the facility. Those nurses did not feel safe accepting patients in OB and they wrote up a safe-report. Apparently it's okay. Granted, I get this second hand info since I quit.

They took an assignment. Granted, it was four postpartum patients that had c-sections but still. Apparently the charting style was completely different and there is great risk in my opinion. Maybe it's the whole "OB-closed unit, scary" mentality where we run the OBs upstairs before the water breaks or she starts pushing. I do not know if the babies were included since I thought they did mom-and-baby style assignments.

I personally would not want an ICU nurse if I had just delivered a baby. No offense, but I would be a new mother who has never breastfeed or attempted to breastfeed.

[Karou]

I quit the facility. Those nurses did not feel safe accepting patients in OB and they wrote up a safe-report. Apparently it's okay. Granted, I get this second hand info since I quit.

They took an assignment. Granted, it was four postpartum patients that had c-sections but still. Apparently the charting style was completely different and there is great risk in my opinion. Maybe it's the whole "OB-closed unit, scary" mentality where we run the OBs upstairs before the water breaks or she starts pushing. I do not know if the babies were included since I thought they did mom-and-baby style assignments.

I personally would not want an ICU nurse if I had just delivered a baby. No offense, but I would be a new mother who has never breastfeed or attempted to breastfeed.

Yeah, I think you were wise to get out of that facility. That's a difficult situation to be put in. If they were strictly only the mothers, they were super stable, and the charge nurse was really going to help, I would probably take the patients. I would refuse if they wanted me to take the babies also. No way would that be safe.