SueC56

Call is going to vary alot from one hospital to another. One hospital in our system has one PACU nurse on call on weeknights and a couple on weekend days (scheduled cases) and one or two on weekend nights. We get minimal trauma cases, they go to one of the two large hospitals. My hospital is small (3 OR/3 PACU beds), we only have 3 PACU nurses. When I started, OR still did their own call case recoveries. After a while, they put PACU nurses on call on weekends only. We each take the whole weekend. OR still does their own weeknight recoveries. OR Nurses have to live within 30 min of the hospital. PACU nurses don't have a specific distance because usually we have plenty of time if know about the case before it starts. As far as how call is assigned, I could let the manager make up the call schedule, but I draft it myself, so we can talk about it before we give it to the manager. She likes not having to make up the schedule. We get paid a small amount for being on call, then get paid time and a half for cases, min two hours paid.

The anesthesia machines actually measure the amount of anesthetic gas exhaled by the patient. They are usually pretty much at zero gas before they leave OR. That's one way that the anesthesiologist knows they are safe to be extubated. We actually wore testing badges once or twice to measure for residual gases in PACU. I assume they didn't show much because we have n't done it since and nobody said anything about the results.

Don't forget to mention that after you take the practice test, it counts for CEUs!