Just wondering, because this is how it worked when I was a hospice nurse; do any of you work for a HD company that has day shift nurses and then on-call nurses who only work in an on-call capacity after hours?
The company that I currently work for (one of the Big Two), expects the acute nurses to work all day, sometimes a very long day, and then still be on call that night. This is the normal practice, not just a once in a while thing when we are short staffed (which is pretty much all the time because no one wants to stick around due to having to be available all 24 hours on some days). I'm getting the impression that this is the norm for the Big Two, and probably for most of the smaller companies, but why do these companies feel that a human being should be able to work 18, 20, even 24 hours straight? This isn't even safe, is it?
I realize that I am probably going to get responses about the cost of having separate on-call staff to cover nights, but if hospice companies do it (and it's pretty much standard in hospice) when their night calls are rarely as long as in HD where even a two hour emergency treatment equals at least four hours out, then why can't HD companies care enough about their acute nurses to do the same? Hospice benefit reimbursement from the government is paltry, so if they can afford it, why can't two very profitable corporate entities do the same for the sake of giving their nurses some semblance of a normal life and a better chance of practicing safely because they aren't fatigued out of their minds?
Signed,
Burned out acutes nurse looking desperately to transition to chronics
