Low Hospital Census

[Sophie Garcia]

I work at a community hospital as a CNA. For the past month or so, the general hospital census has been insanely low. As a result, staff have been getting cancelled left and right. Has anyone else been experiencing this at their facilities?

[Guest1144461]

It was like that at first but now has picked up. I can not get low censused obviously but I have seen nurses put on call in previous weeks. Now, we are borderline full.

[Sour Lemon]

2 hours ago, Sophie Garcia said:

I work at a community hospital as a CNA. For the past month or so, the general hospital census has been insanely low. As a result, staff have been getting cancelled left and right. Has anyone else been experiencing this at their facilities?

Yes. Two of our units closed down completely, and a lot of staff were furloughed. The staff who were not furloughed got canceled a lot, too.

It seems that things are starting to pick up over the past few weeks. One unit is reopened, although with greatly reduced staffing. There's no official word on the other unit yet, but there have been "overflow" patients placed there lately, so we're all guessing it won't be closed for too much longer.

[OUxPhys, BSN, RN]

Yes. However, our GI/Endo lab should be given the green light to go to 100% capacity soon. Gen Med floors have been seeing admissions but specialty floors like cardiology, CT surgery, gen surgery, etc have been slow.

[dontbetachy90, BSN, RN]

From March - May, my 20 bed acute care unit closed down and our staff merged with another unit in the hospital. Census dropped big time due to lack of elective procedures and people wanting to stay home. We were cancelling staff like crazy for first 2-3 weeks, then began mandating that they float to neighboring hospitals in our healthcare system, some of them 45minutes to an hour away, one of them was a COVID-only facility. It was nuts. Our unit opened back up late May and it has been steady ever since; our census has been somewhat low here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary.

[Tweety, BSN, RN]

Yes. Especially when elective surgeries were not allowed. I was canceled for three 12 hour shifts, but as a charge nurse I got more hours than some others. Now things have picked up a bit with elective surgeries, but overall the census is down. However, I'm in Florida and you may be hearing Covid patients are increasingly taking up beds and Florida is at 75% capacity. I don't think we have staff to run at 100%.

[nursemols, ADN, BSN, RN]

At first we were low census..but now in Arizona we have become overwhelmed. Went from one covid unit and two icus to two full covid units two rule out covid units plus three icus counting our ICU overflow within the last two weeks