Psychic Bed Control

Published

i have been in charge recently in my ccu. i am very annoyed at the way they play games with bed control. i have come to call it psychic bed control.

example: i am in ccu and have 3 transfer orders say 1 step-down(intermediate care) and 2 for cardic specific 3se i have the ability to look on the computer and see if there are beds available, now granted i have no idea if some of these beds have been spoken for so to speak but ok lets say step-down shows 4 vacant and 3se shows 2 vacant, now i can see not giving both of the 3se beds out but if there are 4 vailable on step-downn they should be able to give 1 to ccu.

what i always get is well er is pretty full so we are going to wait and see what type of beds they are going to need, i wouldn't want to give you a step-down bed then have someone that needs a step-down come to you! etc.

friday new years eve there was floor that had been closed all week due to low census, it was opened on wednesday and they are 25 bed floor and had 9 pts tele/medsurg. tptb decide they are going to close the floor for the holiday. i spoke to the person in bed control and advised this was a bad idea because i would likely have between 6-9 tranfers from ccu, the rest of the house was fairly full, they didn't have enough bed to just flat out move everyone from this floor to other floors at this time, but they inform me i will not be getting any beds for the immediate future, we will probably have a lot if discharges later in the day and we will wait for those rooms.

i had 23 pts and by 1600 i had 9 transfer orders, and had not recieved any beds, i called to inform at 1630 that i was keepping all of my staff becasue i am still at 23 and bed control says on no don't do that and gives me 5 beds, 4 of which on the same unit, so now i am expected to have the nurses flood that floor and everyone run around and try to get all of these pts out before 7p. it is ridiculous!!!!!

:angryfire no it is stupid :angryfire

Specializes in Psych, Psych and more Psych.

Oh my goodness!!!

Sounds like you had a triple Excedrin kind of shift!!! :eek:

Hang in there,

Mary

Specializes in Nurse Scientist-Research.

I used to see ridiculous things like that when I worked Step-down and Tele. I saw some nurses literally "running" a patient from MICU to Step-down at 11pm because as soon as this patient was transferred the nurse in charge of that patient was going home for low-census (Christmas Eve night!!).

At a very busy hospital where I was working we had a bed coordinator, and she would pull her hair out trying to find beds for er/ccu and icu transfers. Just think of all the money it costs to hold someone in icu or ccu because they can't tx to step down. I have thought of some ways to eliminate this, but no one listens to nurses.

+ Join the Discussion