RehabRedRN

Hi I do wish you luck and thank you for your desire to be a hospice nurse, it is my first love although I do work in other areas of nursing. I also believe it is a calling. I know that my company desires at least a year of RN experience, as mentioned above you are working alone in the field. Your assessment skills must be top notch. You cannot be afraid to make waves with the doctors to advocate for your patient. You have to be able to do a ton of teaching with the families and often other nurses if the patient is in a facility. You have a wonderful head start on this with your experience as a RT. Go for the interview and see how it works out. If this job does not come through look for a hospice that has an inpatient unit and try there as you often have others to work with and it is an incredible learning experience.

HI Our pain management is based off the world health organizations'e pain control ladder. This would give you a good start with your project. http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/painladder/en/

The company I worked for tried for the response time of on hour. We have on call nurses but if they are busy the primary takes the call and if they are busy then the supervisor takes the call. In a situation like yours I would call the facility to recheck on the patient and see if they wanted a visit or could wait until morning for the visit. Since the patient is in a facility they do have support, if it were a family at home I would have gone no matter how much later it was. Just my thoughts on this topic.