Night & Weekends

amnesia · Oct 22, 2005

It mostly depends on the size/level of the hospital you are working for. Our Level 1 Trauma center used to only do emergent cases on Saturdays and Sundays. However over the past few years, we have gone to almost a full scheduled day on Saturdays with emergent cases on Saturday nights and Sunday days. We all take turns with call on Saturday nights (16 hours with a call1 and call2 person), and on Sunday days (12 hours with a call1 and call2 person). Call gets rotated and we usually only have call once a month with one major and one minor holiday. We don't seem to think this is too bad. :rolleyes:

Tweety, BSN, RN · Oct 22, 2005

Our OR will do elective surgeries on weekends to ease the schedule during the week. But surgeons don't often want to work weekends so it's usually only a few cases here and there, but it's not unheard of during our busy winter season here in Florida.

We're a trauma center and have a full OR staff 24/7/365

StokoRN · Oct 24, 2005

I did a travel assignment at Duke University a few years ago. They had 24/7 coverage in PACU. Few cases were scheduled during th over night hours.

I also worked in a 385 bed community hospital that had elective schedule on Saturdays. A couple of the surgeons liked to act as if the "off" hours were their own personel time blocks and would do a lot of "elective" surgeries at any time, any day.

"Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore, it'salready overcrowded from your dirty little war. Jesus don't like killin', no matter what's the reason for..." John Prine

The miracle is not that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.

grimmy, RN · Oct 25, 2005

when i left work at 7:30 last night, there were still at least 5 cases running; a couple were emergent, but the other 3 were cases that were leftovers from the day. one was a radiotracer case that had to go last night, and one was a late-start crani case...as far as weekends go, we do have saturday elective cases, but during the summer they are far and few between. they're starting to pick up now.

MelissaRN · Oct 26, 2005

I work in a hospital that's the "trauma center" for a wide area in our state. Nights can be dull or they can get slammed. They get alot of emergency appy's, emergency splenectomies from car crashes, broken bones, the occassional AAA's etc. We have a team that works nights and we all have to take call in case of multi traumas. We also have a couple of weekend teams that work too, we handle a lot of inpatients that need to come back for internal bleeding or AV shunt declots, crani's that sort of thing.

I take ALOT of call by choice because it's excellent money and a chance to get experience handling the emergent cases. During the day they have their more experienced people handling the big gun emergencies. Weekends are good for that too. As a nurse or a scrub it's important to be able to handle whatever comes crashing through the door, so I highly encourage people to take that extra call and those weekends.

We never, never, never do elective stuff on the weekends, we have our hands full enough handling all the disaster ortho traumas that couldn't be done during the week because the patients weren't stable enough. In the summer you really get burnt out with drunken people that decide to get on motorcycles and then we have to try to put them back together. I lost count of how many limbs I've seen hanging by flesh. Blech!!

Weekends can be dull or downright crazy, there's never a happy medium, but it's what we do!!

ShirleyM · Oct 27, 2005

Usually trauma centers have ORs that run 24/7, including holidays,nights and weekends...you can scroll down the topics for a thread on night/evening crew for more info(I started that one). Where I work we have 1 room open two Saturdays each month just to do elective ESWLs, usually they go from 7am-10am. It usually depends on how many ESWLs they have on schedule. Those ESWLs are staffed by people who volunteer to do them, it isn't part of call. Our call team is for emergencies.

suzanne4, RN · Oct 27, 2005

I have done a cranial/facial reconstruction case that went for over 24 hours. estarted at 0700 on a Monday, and the patient left the OR at about 0900 on Tuesday. I worked my twelve and then was relieved until the am. That was a scheduled case that required many people to rotate thru just to keep going. But routine scheduled cases starting at night usually aren't done. If you only haveone crew on, you don't want to tie them up in a routine case.....they are there for emergencies, and there are usually enough of those to go around.

Many facilities will now schedule routine cases for Saturday mornings, especially short GYN cases or breast biopsies, etc. Sundays are usually for emergencies only.....but again that is up to each hospital to set their own schedule.