dadrn

Used to remove them all the time in Colorado, There was some great docs and nurses there that would show you whatever you needed to learn. I miss that. Now, I don;'t get to remove anything but iv's; no midlines or PICCs, jps etc. I thought that is what we went to school for.

When we get so low on staff in the medicine/oncology ward where I work, we start sending medicine patients to other wards. This is obviously now appreciated by the surgical and ortho people. But we get to the point where we can't take patients from the ICU's and then we go on divert. We stop admitting and send patients to other hospitals.

I'm new at this so bare with me, please. The ward can hold 24 patients, its supposed to be medicine/oncology but we get all kinds from psych to ortho, surgery, telemetry, etc. our acuity systems, based on a census of 18, says we should have 4 RN's, 4 LPN's and 4 CNA,s on days and 3 RN's, 4 LPN's, and 3 CNA's on nights. We're really lucky though if we have 6 nurses total and 4 CNS's on Days and 5 nurses and 3 CNA's on days. This may sould like a lot but when you factor in that this is a medical teaching facility for doctors and that the nurses on the floor usually have from zero to 16 months experience in nursing, its a nightmare. We also have job corps trainees and nursing students on the floor.