Debra,RN

I feel your anguish. When I was a newly licensed LPN (I am now an RN) I worked on a "sub-acute" floor of a LTC I had 20 patients on the day shift. Everyday I thought I was going to lose my license. It sounds like you were set up to fail by the management. I now work at an acute rehab facility on the night shift and have a patient load of up to 15 max, which sometimes is difficult. The mentality that goes into overnight staffing is that the patients are sleeping. We have had nights where we are all running all night long. People don't sleep when they are sick and in the hospital. Then you have to add in the brain injured and dementia patients that need 1:1 supervision. The policies at your facility definitely need to be looked at and adjusted. In our facility if a patient has a trach, they automatically get suction equipment in their room whether they need it or not. We don't have wall suction or central o2 at my place. Use this as a learning experience. As a new nurse you will constantly second guess yourself and wonder if you did enough or the right thing. I hope you can get past this experience and like I said use this as a learning experience, you will never make the same mistake twice.

Would you use a non- rebreather mask for a person who's max o2 is 1.5 lL because of co2retention if there sats drop into the 80's? What would be the most appropriate thing to do?

They expect the nurses to do nursing and HHA visits on the same day. I was scheduled to do 5 nursing visits and 2 HHA visits on the same day and the HHA visits were not clients I was seeing for nursing visits.

We have new administration in our agency and they are making the nurses pick up the overflow from the HHA's. Does any other agency do this? I question whether they can make us assume the role of another discipline. I have worked for this agency for 3 years and have never had to do this.