Nurse patient ratio?!??

[carolinaRN80]

Hello, I'm well into my first year of nursing. I live in South Carolina where we have no nurse to patient ratio laws. I work on a general med surg floor where we are set up in pods. There are 8 rooms to a pod and we often have 8 Pts to one nurse and one cna has up to 16 Pts. I often leave work feeling like I didn't accomplish anything but throwing meds at Pts. I am always frustrated and mad at the fact that I feel so overwhelmed and stretched thin. So far I have cared for up to 12 Pts a shift, not all at once but w admissions and d/c.i really don't understand how anyone likes this?? I want to know if this is normal? What's your patient to nurse ratio and where are you located? How many Pts do u go through a shift?

[ilikesharpthings]

I'm in Oregon, on a med-tele floor. We have a 1:4 ratio, 1:5-6 on nights. It's pretty great! I don't know how you guys do it with 7-8 patients!

[KSjo88, BSN]

And now it's 2018 going into 2019 and SC has a nursing shortage expected to become a crisis in the state in the next 5-10 years. I too lived in SC, I worked fulltime and still qualified for food stamps, WIC, and Medicaid. I'm no longer in SC but hear the ratios haven't changed. Where I am at now patient ratios are 1:4 days and 1:5 nights. Nobody wants to work like a mule everytime they go to work. You can't recover.