Over time limit call coverage.

ixchel · Jul 18, 2015

This seems unreasonable to me. It shouldn't be your responsibility to cover their staffing needs when you've already worked too many hours. I think if I were feeling grumpy enough, I'd tell them as much.

brewerpaul · Jul 19, 2015

My feeling is that staffing is a management issue, so they should manage it instead of passing the buck downstream.

Editorial Team / Admin · Jul 19, 2015

For our main OR, we have two teams on call. This allows for rotating staff if they get called in for a case, go home, and another case gets booked later. No such thing as finding our own call buddy.

Kind of wish my state had this law- I worked a shift, stayed late to finish the schedule, and didn't make it as far as completely changed to go home before we got called about an emergency that took until after we were relieved by day shift, so I ended up working about a 25 hour shift- we only have 1 cardiac call team.

heather42r · Jul 23, 2015

I work my shift (0700-1530) and am on call from 1530-0700 the next morning. If you can work only 16 hours how do you staff weekend call? We do 24 hours, and last weekend I did 48 hours. We are often on call multiple days in a row plus working our shift..plus our night shift nurse quit so we have to cover his shift in addition to our own AND OB and general call. AND we only have 9 nurses. One week I did 70 hours of call plus my normal 40 plus some mandatory overtime to cover night shift. I was really tired that week.

peabozzle · Jul 25, 2015

uh yeah. "Call buddy"? No. I won't be anyone's buddy. I am happy to take my fair share of call, but it's managements responsibility to make sure everyone is covered according to policy/law. I would tell them as much. And I am in management....

RobtheORNurse · Aug 4, 2015

We used to take 3P-7A call, but when it really started getting busy, and several times we were there greater than 24 hours, complaints were foiled with HR and the call schedule was changed so that there is no way you could be on more than 16 hours. It is up to the employer to do this, not the individual. Check with your HR department. It sounds like a manager is shirking their duties

arack05 · Aug 9, 2015

Out of curiosity does this law count only actual time working, and not call?

Ive had days where im working/on call combined for ridiculous amounts of time like 32 of 36 hours .

But ill only end up working around 20~ or so of those hours

SurgicalTechCST · Aug 16, 2015

When I was a fairly new CST, and changed jobs to take an open position at our local county hospital instead of continuing to drive 45 minutes one way to another, I had no idea what a snake's nest I was walking into. The OR supervisor was a chronic micromanager who absolutely refused to let anything go, would talk people down to one another and then sit back and let the fur fly, and continued to allow some of the "old guard" Techs who had been there since Christ was a Corporal and trained OJT rule the roost and let them beat up on newer employees at will. Not physically mind you, but you get my meaning. I should have gotten a clue when I picked up my name badge, and discovered that my legal professional title, C.S.T., had been left off. I had been simply designated an operating room technician (not my legal title) in small letters under my first name. When I questioned this "error" I was informed that they didn't put C.S.T. on my badge because even though I WAS one, "we didn't want to make the other girls feel bad because they had never gone to school to learn their job, they had been trained in house." HUH?

Feel bad?? How about taking away from ME the two years of my busting butt and passing a tough exam to BE a C.S.T.? In any court of law, I would have been held to a higher standard of performance simply because of my certification, over them being OJT trained nurse's aids, picked at random back in the days when the OR was short staffed. They had years and years of opportunities to go to school, with the hospital's tuition reimbursement program, or even just to get the materials and study their butts off and take the certification test, and become one. Until 2000, that was possible. Plenty of opportunities to do that. (Turns out one of them tried it a couple of years before, but couldn't pass it ~ it was much tougher than they expected!) But because I am there now, and am experienced and certified, I am going to be given short shrift, and not "allowed" to be recognized for what I worked very hard, and PAID a lot of money, to be. This just floored me. Then I started seeing the kinds of things they were doing (material for a whole different thread) and got scared, and more and more pissed.

So, I took my issue with the badge to HR, and discussed it with them. I had gotten nowhere with the supervisor, and the other staff seemed to find it amusing in their own twisted way, even though I had not discussed it with any of them. (Yeah, I know, this seems unrelated, but I'm getting there.) So, HR was surprised and very apologetic about it, and put through my request to have my badge remade immediately and properly. Security Dept made them from paperwork normally submitted by supervisors. HR was not happy about this. And apparently it got back to the supervisor about violating some regulation having to do with appropriate identification of staff members, especially in an emergency. Well, I got my badge a few days later, delivered directly to me. It was right, and I put it on and wore it of course. You'd think I would have gone single handedly and beheaded the Chief of Staff by the way they reacted. All kinds of snotty comments about "Oh, we see you had your badge changed?!" Snark snark. "No, I got it fixed because it was incorrect" was the only reply I gave to anyone.

So, anyway, moving forward, their call requirements were rough. One nurse, one Scrub to cover from the end of the shift which ran 6:45-2:45, and same for weekends, same Scrub same nurse, all weekend long from Friday to Monday morning. Four day holidays they tried to split up, but were rarely "successful" due to string pulling and whatnot. I had weeks where I spent more clock hours on call than regular shift.

Over Christmas that year, I got taken down by a virulent flu that was raging through the state, in spite of the flu shot. I passed out in my bathroom, and ended up in an ambulance to the hospital. I was there for 13 hours, while they tried to find me a room, but the place was bulging with flu cases in dehydration and do forth. Turns out I was supposed to be on call on Christmas too. Right? Of course right! The whole time I was there, I begged someone to call my supervisor and tell her where I was and why. They all knew her ~ I just think nobody wanted to speak to her. Finally, somebody did, so she could start rounding up call coverage. It was a lead pipe cinch I wasn't going to be back to work before New Years. I was running 104Â° fever, even after meds and a full IV bag of D5NS, run through me into a catheter bag. No beds to be had, so they wrote me some scripts and sent me home to my own bed. I ended up back in there two days later in horrible condition, but still no beds. Back home. Supervisor bugging me every single day wanting to know when would I be back to work?? For days I did not improve. I went to my own doctor, having my daughter take time off and drive me, because I could barely sit up straight. He was also the Employee Health Doctor for the hospital! He took one look at me, at my paperwork from the ER, and asked me why I was out of my bed! He checked me out and told me to go home and not even think about going back until after New Years! I asked him to please PLEASE tell my supervisor the same do she would leave me alone! He said he would call her and fax over an official note to her, which he did. She still called me everyday, even with that information.

I was still running a fever of 101.2Â° the day I dragged myself back in there, white as a sheet and 13 pounds lighter. I took a look at the call schedule, while I was being glared at by most of the staff, and wanted to cry. To get back at me for "inconveniencing" everyone by daring to be ill over the holidays, I was on call from that day and for 9 of the next 11 days straight! I heard someone mumble something about "I guess that will teach HER not to get sick over the holidays again!" After a couple of months, I saw the new holiday call schedule being worked on, by the supervisor, and she already had me down for ALL of Thanksgiving, Christmas, AND New Years! Finally I had had more than enough, and I told her she could erase all that, because I wasn't going to be there for any of it! She had the gall to actually be shocked! I cleaned out my locker that afternoon and walked away. I lost nothing except aggravation, chronic heartburn and a mounting case of depression. I had already got a line on another job, and was at it in 48 hours. Boy, what a mess that place was. All the supervisory staff has been relieved of their jobs, most if not all of the "old guard" is gone, HR has upgraded their hiring practices to hire ONLY Certified Surgical Techs and other fully qualified staff, and everyone who came in behind me at that time didn't stay much longer than I did, of their own choice. Some left before me. Some ran. There are now two full shifts, to work days and evenings, and call is much less onerous than it used to be.

Yes, this has been long and involved, but I felt that the story about the call situation really needed some background information to put it in perspective. That place was a horror, and had I known any of it before I started there, I would have continued to do that driving to the other place!

FurBabyMom, MSN, RN · Aug 16, 2015

Our facility's rule is we cannot work more than 60 hours in a 7 day period. Only kind of helpful.

We have evening call 1500/1700 (end of your scheduled shift) to 2330. We have nights call 2300-0730. And we have weekends call 0700-0700 (Saturday into Sunday or Sunday into Monday). Currently, we have to take one kind of call (and can cover more call than assigned if we choose to do so). I used to take a specialty call where I was on call several week nights 1900-0700 per schedule period (at least one night every other week or more) and one weekend a schedule period (1900 Friday to 0700 Monday).

The longest continuous time I was on call? A holiday weekend - 0700 Friday to 0700 Monday. I worked 13 hours Sunday into Monday and felt not an ounce of guilt for calling out and messing up Monday AM staffing. I wasn't leaving at/after 0100 and coming back for 0700-1700. Nope.