CMCbabyRN

You are lucky that this is a relatively new scenario for your hospital. I have been an RN for 30 years and have dealt with this in my last 2 jobs. It is a source of contention and strife in our unit. Maternity is another area that is crazy busy or dead quiet. Never any happy medium.. Last year I saw over 100 hours of downtime....... equivalent to about 3 weeks of pay!!!! We have asked for a max/pay period with no success. On our unit, we keep a monthly log. It is decided first by per diems and then volunteers, then the staff member that hasn't been down in the longest period of time. We get a few dollars of call pay because we have to have the full compliment if labor patients come in. It "counts" as a X if you are down for at least 4 hours. Since most of the nurses on our unit works 12 hours, you can't be forced to be down for more than 6 hours, although if you are on for an 8 hour day, you are going to be down for the full 8. 4's don't work with 12 hour shifts. Not going home at 11 and coming back at 3. Some of our day nurses have been going and helping out in outpatient settings. There is more strife there because not everyone does that and so there are a few that sit up on our unit and hang out while the rest of us willing to go, go. Although that is going to be changing. We can choose to use earned time to balance our time, but again, who wants to eat away at their vacation time and have none to take down the road just to make ends meet at home......although sometimes we have no choice!!! Our unit also takes surgical overflow patients but they aren't always enough to keep our full compliment of 3-4 nurses on duty. Ironically, we too have had several retire/resign and now are so short staffed that we have bonuses being offered but with major stipulations to earn them. Our bonus shifts are the first to be cancelled. Gotta love when you have a bonus shift in the first week and downtime in the second week. Yes, we are breaking even, but at the cost of giving yet another day of work and another day of sitting at home by the phone!