SusanO'donnell

hi im an RN working in Belleville,ont. our workload for a busy telemetry floor is 4-5 on days and 7-8 on nights. we do total patient care as well, there are 2 psw's until 1500 and sometimes they may have a couple of ur pt's assigned to them. the corp. is opening 8 more OR's in Belleville as they are closing all the OR's in Trenton. we have a slow stream rehab, rehab and an alc unit in the corp. ALC is alternative level of care and usually this means they are waiting for nursing home. the general population of our patients age is usually 70-90 years of age. 50-60's we see 25% of the time. there is a surgical floor, as well. it sounds to me that u would like to work on the rehab floor, which we consider to be heaven. this would be a unit called sills 3 and there is not staff movement on this floor. sills 4 would be another alt. there is a little more movement, but not much. mostly we need rn's on medicine, surgery and the OR's hope this helps

im a Canadian rn on a busy telemetry floor, rn's and rpn's each have their own assignments, which consists of 5 patients, or sometimes 4 on a day shift, there are 2 psw's and they are assigned 10 pt's. we have 43 beds. psw's are done at 1500 and everyone picks up 1 pt. we do our own total care as psw's don't usually time for most of the patients. the hospital is also laying the psw's off. at 1530 the charge nurse is assigned 3 patients, at 1800 we have no clerk, the clerks will not answer any call bells. at 2330 u r assigned 7-8 pt's and you are on your own, it is hard to get help on the evening shift as everyone is so busy with their own pt's. we do work as a team if it is very busy and try to help other nurses. Canadian patients are very demanding and so are their families. a male patient had barked at an rn and told her she took far too long to serve him. she replied, this is not the military and you are not my commanding officer. we have the same issues as usa, drug seekers, alcoholics, fake symptoms, people who make formal complaints and threaten to sue us. one time we were transferring an elderly patient from another unit as she was to receive tpn, her daughter came to the desk and said to me, is the tpn here yet. I said, no it is not. she said, if it is not here in 30mins I am phoning my lawyer. she came back in 30mins and said is it here, I said, no. she said, I phoning my lawyer. I said, ok. this was a sunday. pharmacy arrived with the tpn in 15 min.

i am an acute care medicine rn and thinking about taking the OR course and i even know that these practices are unsafe, maybe you can report it to licensing board after you quit, at least your conscience would be clear that you had tried to help