Primary nurse assessment

[Mgrn]

I'm a float nurse and about a month ago, I was told by the supervisor to do the admission assessment on a unit for the nurse. I relayed to the primary nurse that I would go over everything with the patient as far as questions, but would leave the physical assessment for her to do. I was then told by the supervisor that I should do everything, including the physical assessment just relay my findings to the patient's nurse and that she did not have to document anything. I feel like this is in violation of nursing ethics, and want to know how others feel.

[subaquatique, ADN, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

I am a primary care RN, but I pick up shifts as a float. In our hospital, we are not allowed to do the admission assessment for the primary care nurse because "passing along prudent information" is like playing telephone- stuff gets missed. Personally, I like doing my own admission assessments because they tell me so much about my patient! When I am float, I will do my due diligence and do an assessment of a patient while I am tucking them in, but we have a policy that it is the responsibility of the primary nurse to do their own admissions and full physical assessment, regardless if it was done twenty times before already. Obviously, a charge nurse will jump in and help, but it is still the full responsibility of the primary nurse. Granted, I live in California and we have low patient ratios. I can't imagine that this would be possible if you have more than a few patients.

[JKL33]

On 8/10/2019 at 8:35 PM, subaquatique said:

In our hospital, we are not allowed to do the admission assessment for the primary care nurse because "passing along prudent information" is like playing telephone- stuff gets missed.

I don't understand. How is giving a prudent report like a game of telephone in this particular circumstance but not others? We generally do not refuse to report on significant physical findings when giving report, and we don't consider it playing telephone to report our own physical findings.

The practice/idea that the primary nurse must compete the admission physical assessment is arbitrary. I haven't heard any rationales that make any sense other than the idea that time-consuming work such as an admission shouldn't be dumped off onto a coworker just because it is tedious and the primary doesn't feel like doing it.

On 8/10/2019 at 8:35 PM, subaquatique said:

we have a policy that it is the responsibility of the primary nurse to do their own admissions and full physical assessment, regardless if it was done twenty times before already.

Except to the extent that each nurse assigned to a patient is responsible to perform his/her own assessment appropriate to the situation, this is utterly nonsensical.

It is not a matter of actual prudent nursing/patient care ethics.