debi87021

Ok, let me get this straight, a doc and nurse constantly "watch" a pt, or just "check-in" every so often. Well,....who is doing the actual nursing care. I can however where this could be handy in a observation unit for seizure patients, but not in icu. I mean, what are "they" going to do, call you to tell you that your patient coded, hell you knew that 2 minutes before they called!...anyway i may have misunderstood the whole concept. Geeze...my facility has never even heard of electronic charting, much less talk about it.:chuckle

:chuckle :chuckle :roll :roll very very occasionally, and this hospitall is in the middle of nowhere. Made me laugh though. Maybe it isn't skunks, maybe it is the sinks, some of them have traps that have filters (well sorta). I don't know!, funny though.

I work out on the navajo reservation. Extremely small hosp. 6 bed ER. Ok, i guess i have it lucky, cause this is IHS facility we have a pharmacy located inside the hospital. Our pharmacy allows us to dispense meds, not just for a few days, or "till morning", but for instance an antibiotic....usually taken for 7-10 days, we dispense (on doc's orders) the full course. Doc has keys to pharmacy at nights to be able to get some of these meds. I personally do not go into that pharmacy. I only dose out the meds as instructed. And btw, we give out OTC's too, tylenol, motrin, you know stuff like that. Anyway, that is how it works for this IHS in the middle of nowhere navajo land. :D

Hmm, sounds like most of you work in a city hospital. I work in a extremem rural setting. One RN on during nights, I don't have an observation "Unit". I do however, obs them here with me in the ER. This hospital doesn't have surgery or icu technology, but the ER is usually used as icu. Good thing i have some icu experience!... Our inpatient nurses are currently rebeling against the ER cause we took one of their cna's. I can not convince these inpatient nurses to accept more than 2 pt's per RN. It gets quite fustrating when i have 6 or more patients....and this is ER. I usually have at the least of one obs per night, i have had up to 5 obs, that leaves me with ONE bed to run the ER. Crazy at times. All the criticals, of course, are flown out via fixed or heli's. I like this idea of a separate unit to house the obs.