How does call work at your hospital?

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

Just curious as to how other hospitals' call systems work. At my hospital, we currently have 8 hour shifts and whoever's on call is responsible for every specialty with the exception of open hearts. We've been considering going to specialty call, since many people only work in one specialty. We recently had a ruptured AAA come in, and the people on call mostly worked neuro, so there was a lot of confusion about instrumentation, draping, etc.

If your hospital does do specialty call, is it broken down into shifts, or are you on call from the time you leave till the start of the next day? If you don't, do the people who take call float to different specialties?

Thanks,

poetnyouknowit

[Scrubby]

At my hospital we don't have to do on call unless we volunteer to do so. This is pretty rare, most other hospitals you have to do on call once a month. We have dedicated trauma staff who work on a 7 day roster and we have elective theatre staff like myself who only work mon-fri like myself.

We can do on call if we really want to but the main reason why a lot of us who do elective theatres choose not to do call is because of the expectation that we should be able to scrub for anything that comes through the door.

While I could probably manage to scrub for a ruptured AAA theres no way I could do an emergency aneurysm clipping (only done two elective ones) without the help of someone with more neuro experience than me. And I don't have that much ortho experience either.

[openheartmary]

We don't staff our OR after 7:30 p.m. We have three call teams:

General/Vascular, Ortho/Neuro, and Open Heart.

[MamaCheese]

Our OR is staffed 24/7. We have a backup call team from 11p-7a monday thru friday and 24 hour calls for saturday and sunday. The only specialty team we have is for hearts and it only consists of scub techs and perfusionists. Our circulators are trained in all specialties and have to circulate whatever comes through the door. We have a level I trauma center a few miles up the road so we see very few trauma cases. Call is signed up for on a first-come first-serve basis and is only assigned when absolutely necessary.

[shodobe]

We are open from 7am to 11pm, Mon thru Fri. We cover call after 11pm to 7am the next day. Sat and Sun are covered 24 hours for both. We have to take at least 6 hours a week and are assigned Sat and Sun every 4 weeks. We cover the full 48 hours. We have a small staff and call during the week is pretty quiet. Weekends can be either nothing or you can work all day and thru the evening. The day people cover call from the time they get off at either 3pm or 5pm depending on their schedule. Call here isn't a big deal.