cmueller

Thank you all for your comments. So many people threatened to quit that they have backed off on making this normal. Our managers put their foot down. The floors are still over run and I still want to help them in any way I can. I would like to advocate for legislation because if it isn't done now, then nurses will continue to have to deal with these issues.

We had a wonderful CNO a few years back that would come in and help if we were desperate and an educational coordinator that will sometimes tech.

I've emailed the state nursing association for more information on how to move towards making this illegal. Unfortunately, there aren't any jobs close to me at the moment. I also really really love my job and the patient population I serve. I'm just sick of corporate bull ****. Hopefully they'll realize how ridiculous this is and stop it quickly. We are set to lose 8 nurses by the end of the year (Before this was ever mentioned), so maybe when upper management gets called in to take patients they'll change their mind.

I really need advice on how to advocate for change. I work in the SICU of a 350ish bed hospital that does cardiac surgery. We got a new CNO two years ago during a nursing shortage. She gave us a slight pay raise and blocked off rooms on the med surg floors when we did not have staff so that they would only have a 6:1 patient ratio at the most and swore that she would keep us from unsafe staffing. Two years later, the med surg floors are back to 1:8 and there's a plan to make the ICU patient staff ratio 4:1 with no 1:1 patients (our normal 1:1 patients are fresh, still intubated open hearts, therapeutic hypothermias, CRRT patients, balloon pumps, and Imepellas). We are currently at 3:1 with charge nurses back into staffing and we are feeling a major strain. This is mostly due to staff illness at the moment, but our CNO has been very open about the fact that this is her goal. I can already tell that patient care is suffering. It's manageable when we have less sick patients, but I'm afraid patient acuity will greatly increase as we get further into flu season and we will start having adverse patient outcomes because we've missed something. There is no law to prevent this from being made our standard of care. Is there anything we can do to start making changes?

You'll get there! It helped me to find a good report sheet to use on my people. I could note med times, key things to remember, and everything I needed to remember to chart about my assessment. Visually reorganizing helped me a ton.