I work in an outpt area; it's busy, 40+hours/week plus we take call on weekends for minor procedures. The weekend call is for scheduled outpts only. We do the procedure and we go home.
In this case, we had a wound care scheduled on a Saturday. The nurse on call is a particularly lazy nurse and does the minimum to get by. She came in to do the wound care and before she left, the PACU called and wanted her to stay a few extra hours to put a wound vac on a pt in PACU when the pt came out of the OR. All of the PACU nurses are trained to put on wound vacs; this PACU nurse just didn't want to do it.
Our nurse said no; she wasn't staying late, she wasn't on call for PACU and the PACU nurse was perfectly capable of doing it herself and the wound care nurse actually had the right to do that. However, most of us would've probably stayed, done the vac and then go home. The PACU nurse got mad, called the nursing supervisor who then called the head of the OR who then tried to call our nurse to do the wound vac. Our nurse stupidly refused to answer the phone and threw the head of OR into a frenzy. So instead of having the PACU nurse do her own wound vac, the backup to the wound care nurse was called in from home to do the vac.
Needless to say, it has caused quite an uproar at my job. The head of the OR is also over the outpt nurses so she has decided that because of the actions of one nurse, all will be punished. She has moved the wound care area to an abandoned part of the PACU and on the weekends, we will come in, do the wound care pts and then cover for the PACU for as long as they want us up until our call is over @ 8pm. Our call is 14 hours on the weekend so now we are not only working our 40hours during the week, we potentially have to work an additional 14 hours on the weekend for a unit we weren't hired for. We've already had 3 nurses walk out over this which is creating an additional burden for the ones who are trying to stay because we need our jobs.
I guess there's really no question in this; I'm just frustrated by the fact I do my job and have done it responsibly but now being punished for the action of another staff member. On Saturdays, I won't even see my family until almost 9pm if I'm forced by PACU to stay the entire call shift. The only saving graces in this is that it's just 2 days every 6 weeks and I've been there so long that OT will cost them $80/hour. But, I still rather be home.
