labornurse

I just recently moved to Utah and was thinking about applying to one of the IHC hospitals here, but I haven't really heard to much about them. Can anyone tell me about them? I would like to get in to L/D.

There may be some corificeat checkpoints scheduled in your area. The seat techs will have some good stories. I am one of several car seat techs in our town. We hold several check points through out the year. There is one story about one of our check points I'd like to pass on. A mom was on her way to a major city for some shopping from our small town. There was a check point that day and she came in to have her 3 year old son's car seat checked. We found things that definitely needed to be changed, and educated her on correct installation and placing the child correctly in the seat, as well as, the correct way to buckle herself in. They left the check point and started to drive directly to their destination. On the way, a car passing a semi failed to see her in her lane. She sweved and rolled her car. The officers at the scene said that if she and her son had not been belted in correctly, they would have both been dead. They both had a few bruises and scratches, but no serious injuries. Definitley important to buckle up!:)

I work L/D and we haven't had a unit secretary or ward clerk for years. We do everything that they used to do, plus janitor work, plus labor pt. Not unusual for us to be an hour or two after shift charting.

We used Meditech in L/D for about 5 years. Finally all the L/D nurses, including our manager, voted to go back to paper charting and the flow sheet. Now we are much happier and charting is much more accurate and faster. Meditech is the worst. Every time they say they are upgrading, it results in some kind of problem that takes 6 months to fix.:angryfire

We had an incident at our hospital involving a sponge left in the lady parts after a svd. Pt came in to ER about 3 weeks later c/o fever and abdominal pain. lady partsl exam revealed sponge. Pt sued. Now protocol is for radiographic sponge, sponge count by nurse and physician. If the count is off, automatic pelvic xray.

I work in a rural hospital as an L/D nurse. Sometimes we are booming and sometimes we have 0-1 pts on the floor. We work depending on census. If low census such as 0-1 pts, 1 nurse works and the rest are on call. In a near by large city, nurses working at the large hospitals go in to work no matter what the census. Is it more common for census to determine how many and who works or, for nurses working no matter what the census is?

We outpt these gals and monitor, typically for 1-3 hours, for contractions and cervical change. If in pain, our obs will prescribe pain med. If no cervical change, or medical need, they are discharged. If they refuse induction, they are discharged. We are a small rural hospital and do not have the rooms or the nursing staff to monitor a pt who is not in labor or have a medical need for monitoring.

I have been working graveyard shift for about a year (12 hours shift 1800-0600) and I am constantly amazed how little respect that people have for my sleep time. My family feels that 2 hours sleep should be plenty and if I sleep longer than 4 hours, my husband is waking me up. My kids activities are scheduled around 10:00 am and I am constantly guilted into comitting to help in my church from 9:00 am to 12:00 on sundays even though I have just worked 4 or 5 12 hour graveyards straight. I have tried everything I can think of to convince everyone that I need to sleep too, but it falls on deaf ears. Anyone else have problems like this? What did you do to finally get your sleep?

There are repercussions on my unit. Don't come in, and you can count on being on call or floated for your next shift. Does come up in evaluation. A lot of people didn't get their 3% raise because "they weren't team players." They still wonder why they offer a sign on bonus but no one will bite:uhoh3:

I agree with mjlrn97. My hospital is offering sign on bonuses for any warm body with a license because of high turnover. They are also offering bounty money to nurses who work there, for any nurse (rn or lpn) they can lure in to this facility(something you definitely wouldn't do to a friend.) The turnover is due to the dark ages management mentality and staffing ratio. I would think twice and look three times before I jumped in to a sign on bonus.

I have never been assulted by an MD, (there isn't one in the facility I work who would dare), but I have had a CRNA throw things at me when the epidural wasn't going the way he wanted. It the same thing kept happening to other nurses too until we got together and told him that the next time we would be charging him with assult and sueing for damages. He left shortly after that.

I would like to see our hospital stop floating people to units that they have little experience in, then insisting that they take a full pt load. We have had a lot of nurses say No Thanks to a job when they find out the hospital floating policy. We have also had nurses leave because they felt their license at risk because of this policy.

I am very sure that the last facility that I worked at will be working very hard at trying to implement this law, and then convince the nurses that it will be in their "best interest". They have tried other schemes before. Last one was to give half of the nurses a payraise this year and the other half a payraise next year. To make it up though, they added visual to our insurance that we had to pay for. The only thing that administration didn't count on was that nurses can add 2+2. They went back to giving everyone a pay raise, but I don't doubt that they are seeing $$$$$$ signs with the new overtime laws. Glad I am not working there anymore.

After working a 12 hour shift that was totally crazy with no breaks and no lunch, I sat down finally 5 minutes before the end of my shift. Manager's comment? "If you need something to do, there are beds that need to be made and stocking that needs to be done.

Our dietary department is terrible also. Had a pt who's husband had been with her all day and would not leave. She was ill with hellp and was critical. I call dietary for a comp tray for him as he hadn't eaten since breakfast the day before. They told me that since they had sent a comptray already to another pt, they couldn't send 2. I lost it and went balistic. Called our wonderful DON who went a picked up the tray herself. I guess it is the same all over..................sigh

Our unit has always had 2 nurses at vag delivery. Baby's nurse may be an LPN. One RN or LPN and one RT at C/S I agree that staffing less than this is very risky especially in such a litigation ridden area. Our unit follows awohnn and nrp guidelines.

Works exactly the same way at my hospital Kansan_RN. I loose a lot of pay because in my unit it is either feast or famine. I am either running my butt of or sitting at home being paid $1.00 an hour. I don't have any vacation time either.

The dotted ones are threads you have posted on.

I have also been awakened by the phone and answered it as if I were on my unit. I still get teased about it.

At my hospital we are given a choice of whether we want our full name or not. Some do have the full name (mostly upper management), but most have opted to have only the first name.

In our OB/Nsy unit, the only place other nurses float is to the postpartum floor. We, however, are expected to cover every other unit in the hospital. If there is an influx of pts, we cover our own unit. One time we had so many pts we were drowning in labor, postpartum, nsy, and nicu. One of the OB docs asked why there weren't more nurses coming in to help. We explained to him that all the nurses on the unit that could possilbe come in were already there (our unit manager had just worked labor for 30 hours straight and had gone home to bed for a while) and the hospital said there was no one to float to our unit. The OB got really angry and said that if there was no one that could float, then he would go and get the DON to work labor:chuckle Needless to say, a nurse from OR was magically transported to work postpartum so that nurse could come back and do labor:cool: Since then we have been getting more help with nurses and aids from the other units, but we still float more out than in. I agree it is a dangerous practice. We have all been oriented to med/surg for 2 days, but we are floated to all areas of the hospital and many of us haven't been oriented to other places. When I float, I only do tasks because sometimes I am the only labor nurse in the hospital.

When our hospital switched from paper charting to computers, administration touted this as a way to free us from paper. Everything would go into the computer and we would have a paperless system within 3 years. The charting would be stream lined and we would have more time for pt care. The amount of paperwork now and required redundant charting in this so called paperless system is staggering! This system alone must account for the disappearance of at least one rain forest per day:(

:rotfl: :chuckle :rotfl: :chuckle

I really respect the nurses that work med/surg at our hospital. They are very knowlegeable and try hard to be helpful to us ob nurses that occasionally get floated there. They have a lot of crap to put up with, but they still deliver the best pt care they can. Med/surg is ok once in a while, but I would want to work there all the time.

Come sit on my lap and tell pinochio a lie. If I told you that you have a beautiful body would you hold it against me? I'm feeling a little off today. Will you turn me on?