Lap tops and Phones..This is too much

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At work I push around a lap top that is on a cart with wheels 9-13 hours a day. I record all infomation, MARs are there, orders completed there, etc. Now, my hospital wants all nurses to carry phones. I carried one yesterday and in 1 med pass in 1 room I was called 5 times on the phone and had to start the medication pass in that room 5 times. :madface:

I have MD's calling and asking me privacy information on the phone as I am in another patients room. :nono:

While in patient rooms, I hear nurses in hallways now talking about Mrs "Jones" diarrhea and Mr "Jones" new orders for meds, procedures and psych problems. :nono:

I'm just wondering why nursing has turned to this? :idea:

I spend more time in front of a computer and on my "cell":uhoh3: than with the patients!

Does all of this really help us? How do I juggle patient care and privacy when my hospital is doing everything it can to put me in a bad position to accidently disclose information?

I feel the nursing station is the appropriate place to discuss information quietly. Dashing down the hall way with some rushed MD on the line complaining that they have to listen to you run clear down the hall to get to a chart for information is not my idea of helpful at all.

What do you think?

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Hi,

My facility has the computer carts, but most nurses leave them at the nurses station, or park them in the hall near their pt rooms. I've only seen one nurse who pushes the whole cart into each pt's room. We have pagers instead of phones. I'm on night shift and we don't use them much, but I think the secretary can page the nurse with a short message that there is an MD on the phone or Mr. Jones wants pain meds. I think it would be too distracting to have a phone ringing all the time, not to mention rude. With the whole customer service thing that the hospitals want to do, I'm surprised that they would ask nurses to answer phone calls in front of pts. When I worked at a library we were never supposed to answer the phone when we had a live person in front of us.

Jessica

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Hi,

My facility has the computer carts, but most nurses leave them at the nurses station, or park them in the hall near their pt rooms. I've only seen one nurse who pushes the whole cart into each pt's room. We have pagers instead of phones. I'm on night shift and we don't use them much, but I think the secretary can page the nurse with a short message that there is an MD on the phone or Mr. Jones wants pain meds. I think it would be too distracting to have a phone ringing all the time, not to mention rude. With the whole customer service thing that the hospitals want to do, I'm surprised that they would ask nurses to answer phone calls in front of pts. When I worked at a library we were never supposed to answer the phone when we had a live person in front of us.

Jessica

You guys brought back a great memory for me of my M/S days.. We used to carry pagers. The hospital wanted a quiet hospital. No over head paging.

I always wore my pager in my bra and left it on vibrate.. LOL

It was a riot chatting with a doc in the hall and having that thing go off. One doc looked at me and I told him don't worry it's just my defibrillator..LOLL

And some of them got "dropped" in the toilet..

I think they got rid of them shortly after I left..

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Specializes in OB, M/S, HH, Medical Imaging RN.
At work I push around a lap top that is on a cart with wheels 9-13 hours a day. I record all infomation, MARs are there, orders completed there, etc. Now, my hospital wants all nurses to carry phones. What do you think?

We have the same carts with laptops and I prefer to have them. Our med errors over the past 4 years have dropped over 90%. For numbers like that I can stand pushing it around. We have to take it into the rooms because our scanners are connected to the cart. They have talked about cordless scanners but so far no show. They have talked about cell phones. I would almost prefer them. We have pagers now. My pager goes off constantly. It doesn't matter if I'm in a room, eating, in the bathroom, talking to a doctor. The majority of the time the message on the pager is not clear and I have to walk to or call the desk just to find out that the page was an error or someone asking for pain med that I've just given or the page is actually for a tech. If we had a phone at least I could say, sorry wrong nurse, that patient just had pain med 5 minutes ago, or tell the patient I'll be there in a few minutes or whatever I would have said after taking many more steps.

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Specializes in Med-Surg, Wound Care.

We recently got phones too. The nurse and the techs phone numbers are written on the "dry board" in every patients room. So now you have unit secretaries, doctors, hospital departments and patients calling you! It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen... why do we have call bells????? At least with a beeper if you're in the middle of something you can scroll back to find out who beeped.. with the phone if you don't answer you have NO idea who called you. Great for patients who think you're ignoring them.:angryfire

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Ahhh...This brings back some fond memories. We had one great head nurse who instituted a policy on her floor that spread rapidly. The unit secretary, or whoever answered the telephone would find out who the caller wanted, and would reply along these lines: "Ms. Nurse is busy with a patient right now, but if you will leave me your name and telephone number, I will have her call you back as soon as she can." None of this dashing back and forth down the hall to answer a telephone -- that was why we had secretaries! Did we get flack from doctors? Of course we did, but when a doctor complained, we merely asked him very nicely if it would make him happy to have us neglect one of HIS patients while we ran to the phone.

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Specializes in ICU.

Wow! It sounds like you guys in the US have alot more money than we do!

When I worked in the ER, we tried using phones but it was for nurse to nurse communication ( mostly triage to charge if we wanted to warn of a sickie that needed a room NOW ) or for the NURSES to call the docs to come and see their pt .

But even that didn't last long, they were cumbersome .

I couldn't imagine carrying a phone and having everyone calling you. It's bad enough as it is with every little fellow wanted to use you as a cheat note instead of reading the chart to write their little consult note.:nono:

We do things the old fashioned way, all calls come to the nursing station and then the nurses are buzzed to ask if they are available.

If the MD really needs to talk to us, they find us.

It sounds like , like many things, all this was created to make things easier for everyone except us!

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Specializes in Med/Surge.

There is no way that I would want a phone on me for everyone to have the number to call at will!!!! The overhead "room" paging is enough to make me want to "slit my wrists" on most days!!! I usually tell the patients that I am going to change my name so only they would know it and then I would know to respond!!! I could probably go for a vibrating pager myself!! I don't know much about the lap-top carts but that doesn't sound too bad especially if it is small enough to go into rooms and if it helps with Med errors I am all for it!!

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Specializes in Emergency Dept, M/S.

We use pagers at my hospital, both aides and nurses. It does make for a very quiet floor. Since they are text pagers, we know what room needs what done, and if we have a phone call, it says "phone call" and the extension number to punch in where the call is parked.

Our nurses have computers-on-wheels (COWS, as they are lovingly called!), but couldn't imagine them carrying phones also.

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We use laptops and phones also.

I agree that our med errors are down significantly due to all the scanning. It's a little time consuming at first, but as you learn to incorporate it into your day, it makes life easier- pass the med and chart it, note the BG, etc., then move along.

I love the phones. The pts can call me directly and can have their needs met more quickly. I hated coming into a room only to hear "I called the nurses station 20 minutes ago.." Many problems can be handled on the phone and if I can't get to the pt right away, I can tell them "OK, I have my hands full right now, but I'll be ther in x minutes."

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

One of the nursing homes I worked in had the nurses carry a cordless phone because we were so busy, no one was ever at the nurses station to answer the phone. Although it saved some steps, it was an aggravation because you had to stop what you were doing and answer the phone. At home I don't answer the phone if I'm in the middle of doing something. However, I didn't feel that it would be appropriate to do that at work. There were still a lot of times that we had to walk back to the nurses station to dig into a chart.

For a long time I have thought that facilities should be designed like dry cleaners where they press a button and the clothing is brought around on an electric track to the clerk. If they could figure out a way to move patient rooms around and bring them to the nurses station, wouldn't that be terrific? Think of the all the walking we wouldn't have to do! I also was saying 30 years ago that we needed beds for confused patients and those at high risk of falling that recessed into the floor so there was no way for the patient to fall out of bed. The low beds the LTCs have been using do a pretty good job of solving that problem.

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Specializes in ICU, nutrition.

I work in surgical ICU and our asst nurse managers and charge nurses carry cell phones. The rest of us use the phones at the nursing station, although if I go down to eat with my husband and kids and will be unavailable during my lunch break, I'll take one of the unit cell phones with me to the cafeteria.

Absolutely love the COWs (computer-on-wheels)!

Konni

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