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Discussion

LPN's being on call

The agency I work for does not allow LPNs to take call. It is not outside our state LPN scope of practice and the LPNs are not unwilling to add their names to the roster of nurses on call. Management simply refuses (dunno why) to allow LPNs to rotate on call nights. My suspicion is that it is because LPNs are paid hourly and the RNs are salary. Therefore if an LPN gets a call from which a visit might need to be made, it costs the company extra money whereas the same situation with an RN it does not. We have more LPNs than RNs and it sure would be nice to reduce the number of call nights required by including all the nurses in the schedule.

How does your agency do call?

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    • Experts

    Anybody can be oncall for shift work, but have never seen LPNs oncall for the "visit" type patient, only RNs. I think your reasoning hit the nail on the head.

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    • Experts

    My agency doesn't use LPNs for call because of our PICC/central line patients. The companies who contract us require only RNs on those cases.

    The only people who are salary at my company are office staff and the director.

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    • Author

    We do not deal with central lines... so that's not it, but thanks for your input.

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    one agency i worked for did have the LPN's take call, the RN on call sup had to back her up if there was an issue she could not handle, (SOC, IV, death),,,worked out well for everyone.

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    Our LPNs can sign up for call but it is not required. I don't like it because they cannot do initial visits or OASIS assessments. IMHO, only an experienced RN should be placed in an on-call position.

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    • Experts

    I agree that an experienced RN would be a better choice to have oncall because they have the better resources to respond to anything that might come up in the middle of the night. Routine calloffs for shifts can be handled by any of the nurses doing that type of work, but potential emergencies should be addressed by those best equipped to deal with them.

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    Very similar to ours. The main reason it is RN only for on-call for us is we do get frequent OASIS in the evenings, as well as PICC/central lines with IV antibiotics, chemo or TPN. We also have a hospice and have to often pronounce at home. The LPNs rotate being on-call for actually working on the weekends

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    we have an rn for triage...but thats all they do unless they have to do an roc. Lpns on call do the weekend visits and do the oncall visits. Rarely does the rn go out. we (lpns) try to resolve the problem but if we are unable to, we call 911 to transport the pt to the er. this is a requirement of the company. Every lpn takes call. Works out to one week of call q two give or take.

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    Until recently our LPN was on call as well, with an RN back up in case of something outside of her scope. She is the only one of us who doesn't live in town and several times would call whoever her backup was and have them make the visit so she didn't have to drive over because it was "faster for the patient". Partly because of that, the discontinued her being on call. She is the only LPN in our agency with 3 RN's....we are all paid hourly.

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