shahall

Thanks for your suggestion. We tried that and administration did talk to the physician once. Our hospital endo unit has lost a lot of cases to a near by free-standing endo unit. The physician jumped up and down and threatened to take all his cases there and administration backed down. We only have one RN on call so she could not possibly do 8 cases or more plus recover them by herself. This particular physician has instructed us not to tell his patients anything if they question why he is late and he doesn't even answer our pages any more. It's not a problem administration is going to address so the late people are stuck staying late every day while the early people go home on time. It's causing a lot of bad feelings in our unit.

I work in a hospital endoscopy department and we have an on-going problem with late cases. One physician in particular consistently over-books cases and shows up 1-2 hours late on a regular basis but management refuses to do anything about his behavior. We are a small department with 3 endo suites, 4 FTE RN's and 4 PTE RN's. Our scheduled hours of operation is supposed to be 7:30AM - 4:00 PM but due to the large number of late cases we are now staggering shifts based on seniority, earlier shifts manned by higher senior nurses. Three RN's are now scheduled to work 7-3:30, two work 7:30-4:00 and one works 8-4:30. The 7-3:30 RN's leave every day on time and the later nurses are stuck staying late, sometimes til 6 PM or later, on a regular basis. Of course the 7-3:30 nurses see nothing wrong with this situation and are opposed to rotating the later shifts so resentment is building in our unit. I'd be interested in hearing how late cases are handled by other units.