rnsteph87

Doctor - “after you nurse…”

My opinion is it’s none of there business. We have reached a time in nursing where management and administration have and will use anything available against you if needed. Your medication is prescribed to you. It is legal. And simply none of there business. But at the end of the day… do what is right to you and what makes you comfortable. ?

I am a nurse who works in research and we are currently growing our department and taking in new ventures. My question is, does anyone know are there laws regarding staffing requirements for an inpatient within a hospital in the state of Mississippi? Would it be acceptable for a patient to be admitted overnight on a unit with only one nurse there to observe them and a DOCTOR available if needed? No other staff on the floor. Just the one nurse. This doesn’t seem safe to me but I haven’t been able to find anything discussing it. 

Hello. I am a nurse who works in research and we are currently growing our department and taking in new ventures. My question is, does anyone know are there laws regarding staffing requirements for an inpatient within a hospital in the state of Mississippi? Would it be acceptable for a patient to be admitted overnight on a unit with only one nurse there to observe them and a DOCTOR available if needed? No other staff on the floor. Just the one nurse. This doesn’t seem safe to me but I haven’t been able to find anything discussing it.

Thanks, guys. I really wanted input to make sure I wasn't wrong in my thoughts. I actually quit. I have a job in a CVR unit at a much bigger hospital. I start on February 18th. I got further confirmation that this was the right move when I took a patient to this hospital yesterday. I have been a paramedic in this community for 8 years. We have 2 hospitals to choose from. I took in an 80 something-year-old male who was in afib with RVR. He also had a friction rub with muffled heart sounds. I advised the hospital of this enroute and again once at the hospital. A nurse friend of mine called me last night and said that he agreed with me totally on diagnosis, but the doctor gave him metoprolol and gave him 5 liters of fluid and sent him to ICU where he coded while rolling through the doors. This gentleman was maybe 90 pounds. My thoughts are he had fluid around his heart and 5 liters of fluid increased pressure from the inside cause arrest. I can't fathom giving 5 liters of fluid to this particular patient. Stuff like this happens constantly there though.

I currently work for a facility that financially is not doing well. We can't get certain supplies due to suppliers not being paid. Many nurses have quit. I work in the ICU at this facility and they have turned us into a float pool. The problem with that is we constantly get pulled from our ICU to staff the medsurg floors. When this happens we are given the worst patients and all the discharges so that we have to take all the new admits. On top of this, we lose our ICU differential so we get paid less when we go to a floor that we didn't want to work on, to begin with. We have pointed this out to management who say there is nothing they can do about it. They started having a shortage of nurses in ICU due to everyone quitting because of how we are being treated. When this happened we were told we can not use any of our vacation time unless we find someone to fill the spot that we want off from. We also received letters saying the hospital would not be matching our retirement this year. Our charge nurses have to take patients in the unit just like everyone else, but the charge nurses on the floor are not required to take patients no matter how short they are on nurses. As an ICU nurse at this facility, I have been put in many situations that were unsafe for the patient. They will triple us up with patients for one nurse, sometimes it being 2 or 3 vent patients at once, so they can pull one of our nurses to a medsurg floor. The doctors at this facility are never on the same page with each other. They do NOT listen to the nurses at all. When we tell them that a patient is not ready to leave ICU they send them anyway and then go to management when the patient gets worse and say that the nurse didn't take good care of them. I'm just curious if any other facility has issues like this? Is this normal for every facility? Would you work at a facility that has this many issues? What are your thoughts on being pulled from an ICU to a medsurg floor?