Lifting huge laundry bags...

[Drowsyrn]

I have been a nurse for 15 years, the last seven have been in PACU. I can go through my whole story of how I have always been a team player, willing to go above and behind, blah blah. My problem seems small but it is really bothering me. I work at an ambulatory surgery center (started 2 months ago). Some days we may have 55 patients, mostly eye surgeries with probably ten or so general cases being ortho. It's a long day, no breaks, short lunch, we all know the drill. I accepted that years ago and concentrate on pt care.

Here's my dilemma. The nurses strip and clean the stretchers and fill the laundry bags and bring them to the dirty utility room. The eye pts are also on stretchers so you're looking at linen for 55 stretchers. At the end of a ten hour + day, we are then expected to push the huge linen cart across the parking lot and then take each bag and hoist them up into a different bin outside which the laundry company picks up in the evening.

I'm all for doing my part but this seems wrong on so many levels. Now I know it's easy to say, I'd go right to my manager and say this and that. I'm a very assertive, confident, fair minded nurse. I know how to deal with management and coworkers. I am going to go to my manager, he's very approachable and a good guy. I am contemplating if I want to say I don't think it is work for a nurse to do, now don't go postal on me for saying that. We are professionals and work very hard for 8, 10, 12 hours a day. Or, if it is not something physically we should be doing. Not sure if I want to go the "it's tough physically" route. I know we have to carry our load but this is getting crazy. I have had many jobs (I'm a military wife who has traveled for 25 years with hubby), but have never had to lift twenty laundry bags over my head into a dumpster type bin at the end of the day.

How would you all approach it?

[suga_junkie, BSN, RN]

Depends on where you are. Is pericare beneath you because you have an education?

No, because it's part of NURSING, it's our job. I really don't get your point. Why do nurses have to be martyrs that should do everyone else's jobs as well as their own without a word of complaint? Let's get rid of housekeeping/kitchen staff/orderlies/ward clerks/engineering etc etc too and do all of their jobs on top of ours. As it is, I already do many tasks that come under those job descriptions every shift and this takes away from providing a safe level of nursing care that cannot be provided by non-nurses. They are not beneath me, I simply do not have the time to do them and competently care for the medical needs of 5-6 acute post-operative patients too. Btw, we do not have CNAs in my Australian hospital (or RTs!) so pericare is my job...

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

A few suggestions:

1) Make an agreement among you all that no laundry bag will be more than 1/3 - 1/2 full, whatever seems an easy lift (This is a stopgap measure until you get your physician employers to recognize that just because nurses are mostly women they aren't automatically housekeepers.)

2) Ask the physicians to help out, because they are big strong men. I'll bet that will last about one day before they hire someone or assign it to housekeeping/maintenance.

3) Make sure your physician employers are paying your mandatory state work comp insurance premiums, and then call up your facility insurance carrier (or the state agency that regulates work comp) and find out what the average cost to an employer is for a work-sustained back injury (in their copays and increased premium for medical care and wage replacement benefits -- work comp is an insurance plan, after all). I'll bet you anything it's a damn sight more expensive than hiring a maintenance worker.