Low census anyone?

[Humbled_Nurse]

We are sooooo slow right now. It's ridiculous. I am getting cancelled at least once a week. We will pick up a little then we are right back down. It's driving me nuts. Where are all the babies? Our delivery service is unchanged and busy as ever (4,000/year). I just don't get it. I'm not asking for tons of babies, but at least 15 would be nice. Those darn tocolytics and steroids. Also the length of stay is just not what it used to be.

I am in the DFW area. Anyone else slow in the DFW area or in other parts of the country?

[RainDreamer, BSN, RN]

We're not too bad. We have some slow spurts, but that just means we don't have as much OT available as before. Our census isn't packed like usual, but we have lots of sick kiddos that are 1:1, so that keeps us still using about 35 nurses/shift.

[dawngloves, BSN, RN]

I want to understand more about your facilities that you say run overfull. This just feels really foreign to me, and I want to understand more about how this works!

We go way over several times a year. I know it's a big no-no and the hospital may get fined for it, but we are the only unit in our hospital that can take care of babies.

We tell the OB floor that we are full and hopefully the attendings divert their pts to another hospital, (fat chance). We send some to the regular nursery, term ones that are stable and just doing 48 hrs of abx or maybe just need a little phototherapy

.We try and transfer out, but often everyone else is full too. So if they are born in our facility and are sick, they are ours to keep.So, we scrounge up monitors, isolettes and vents (rent or borrow). Everyone sucks in their gut and squeezes a bed in where there are o2 and sx outlets.

[lilbug]

We've been slow too for a couple months. Typically we have 50-60 babies, but we've been consistently in the 30s for a while now. We are getting called off about every other week. It's just awful! And to think my hospital has the most births in Ohio every year....I wonder if we will lose that status this year.

[babyNP., APRN]

I'm on my second night of OT this week. It's not necessarily that we have that many babies but that we moved to a huge new unit with all private patient rooms, so vented patients are trying to be kept 1:1. Sure, I'll sit for 12 hours only working maybe 4 of them, lol. I don't think this will last long.

[pattyjake64]

Los Angeles area, Level III NICU, 03/20/10: We've been slow since 11/09, have been getting slower since then. Registries offer little help (rarely get calls for NICU RNs). It's really scary right now. Better luck to the rest of you!

[dawnebeth]

In Northern California, we were horribly slow for several months--one time getting down to 19 patients, and our high is 38. The last two weeks, the census has risen quickly and we're holding about 28-30, although a large number of those were RSV babies for awhile. We did get a bunch of syndromes and asphyxias suddenly, too.

[spartangal1989]

I'm in Detroit, and for the 13 years that I have been an NICU nurse low census was not a problem. That is until now. Since December we have been on and off slow. I have been given more LCD in one month than i have in the previous 12 years! I don't want babies to be sick, but I need my money

[BittyBabyGrower, MSN, RN]

We usually run 45-50 kids, we are at 20 right now. Sucks.

[texas2007, BSN, RN]

We've been slow since January-ish, about 20-30 babies below normal. People getting cancelled and floated left and right. Actually, it's not that we don't have admissions bc we do, it's just they dont stay very long.