Lisah

I am the charge nurse of a 30 bed medical/surgical/ palliative care unit. We presently have a charge nurse on days only,7-3. our evening in charge is on maternity leave, when she returns we will be rotating the shifts. on days I make rounds with the doctors when they permit it, the doctor's orders are all done manually, the unit clerk does the orders preferably with the charge nurse. The charge nurse does the assignments, deals with families, does most of the discharges with patients. I work with admitting and assign beds to new admissions. As the charge nurse I am the contact person for most all departments. I am the resource nurse for the staff on the floor. We have 3 RN's and 3 LPN's for 30 patients, we have this staffing until 7pm, and then we reduce to 2 RN's and 3 LPN's till 11pm then it is 2 RN's and 2LPN's. Once I leave at 3pm, one of the floor nurses takes the incharge role. Their responsibilities are basically only in an ememrgency they need to set the appropriate chains in motion. At present the charge nurse has no patient assignment, though when there is a sick call that we can't replace I end up taking a full team and the unit manager comes to the desk and takes on my role, it is a nice break for a change, and the extra 40 cents isn't a big loss. As charge nurse I find I spend half of my day on the phone. We did a workload management assessment and they did not believe the amount of time on the phone. I tracked the calls we fielded in a 7am-11pm shift and we fielded over 130 calls. Imagine for 30 patients. The best advantage is that I love my job. I enjoy the interactions with the doctors and I love being a resource to the nurses.

we run our platelets through a standard blood filter wide open and we do our vitals before half way through and at the end of the infusion. Our blood is run through the standard filter and on a pump with a main-line of saline.Our irridiated blood used to go through a Pall filter but that is no longer required only the standard filter.

This made me think of my first death I experienced at the hospital I had just started at. I had only been there a few weeks when one of my pt's died, they were a no code, and had a terminal illness, and I had dealt with death before, so no big deal I figured. WRONG. I notified the family doc, and proceeded with the post-mortum care. The doc had said he would be in shortly to pronounce the person. I had the body all done up and in the body bag when the doc finally arrived an hour and a half later. We went in to the room and the doc looks at me and says, are you sure he is dead? did he say anything? I had no idea what to say so I looked at the doctor and said I'm pretty sure he is dead or he would have said something when i zipped up the bag! I later found out the doc had a problem, but it was a new experince for me.