Oncology as independent specialty floor or part of Med/Surg?

[Lenap]

For those of you working inpatient Oncology floor in a hospital settings :

I am interested to know if your floor considered to be a separate specialty or is it part of a Med/Surg? Our oncology floor only admits/treats cancer patients and is called "Oncology Unit", it seems like our staff is being viewed as regular Med/Surg nurses. All staff is chemo-certified and many have OCN certifications. We are normally well staffed unit (we have don't have any job openings at present time), but the rest of the hospital is short staffed. Now more than before our nurses are being pulled to severely short staffed med/surg or telemetry floors leaving us short staffed as well. But when we have call-outs, it's usually the problem we have to deal with outselves as the hospital not able to send us a med/surg nurse as they are not chemo-certified or not able to care for such pts as acute leukemics. Recenly our unit made a request to allow us to become an independent unit so we can staff ourselves and cover call-outs by having our nurses on-call. While our nurses would not be pulled to other floors. So far we only received a negative answer from hospital management. It sure sounds like they enjoy staff sharing our oncology certified nurses to staff their med/surg floors.

I would like to know if anyone has been through similar experience. Please share it.

Thank you