Question: Specialty pay for Labor & Delivery nursing?

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I'm curious how many hospitals out there are paying specialty pay differential for Labor & Delivery nurses. This has been brought up time and time again on our unit. In our hospital, the general consensus is that if you cannot float to other units and other units cannot float to you, you are considered a specialty unit. The one exception to that rule seems to be our Labor & Delivery unit. Even though we meet the above criteria, they have decided that we are not a specialty unit. Coming from an oncology/med surg unit, I can say (and I'm sure all Labor nurses can agree) that there is no way a med surg nurse could come in and do our job with no training. It would be downright dangerous. There is a mandatory 4 month training if you haven't done Labor & Delivery before and I can say that I felt like I was a new grad again going through the training because it was almost all different in every way. We are an ER, an OR, and a critical care unit.

Although I am interested in hospitals everywhere, I am most curious about those in Illinois, especially in the greater Chicagoland area. Thanks friends!

I work at a hospital that pays L&D nurses 3 more dollars an hour for working in L&D. We are a closed unit and therefore have no help from the float pool, we run drips, circulate in the OR and triage OB emergency patients. We are a specialty unit that deserves specialty pay. Mother/baby does not receive specialty pay at my hospital but they are also not running multiple drips (insulin, Pitocin, magnesium), running back to circulate emergency sections and monitor a fetus and high risk mother all at once! Other units don’t think we provide critical care but that’s because they often don’t see or hear about what we do. Try managing a mass maternal hemorrhage while your co-worker is providing neonatal recitation to an unresponsive infant while a family stands by and watches. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies and it takes special training (NRP certification, EFM certifications) to do what we do. 

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5 minutes ago, Renee Hubbard said:

I work at a hospital that pays L&D nurses 3 more dollars an hour for working in L&D. We are a closed unit and therefore have no help from the float pool, we run drips, circulate in the OR and triage OB emergency patients. We are a specialty unit that deserves specialty pay. Mother/baby does not receive specialty pay at my hospital but they are also not running multiple drips (insulin, Pitocin, magnesium), running back to circulate emergency sections and monitor a fetus and high risk mother all at once! Other units don’t think we provide critical care but that’s because they often don’t see or hear about what we do. Try managing a mass maternal hemorrhage while your co-worker is providing neonatal recitation to an unresponsive infant while a family stands by and watches. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies and it takes special training (NRP certification, EFM certifications) to do what we do. 

Resuscitation* 

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Specializes in Nurse Resident.
On 10/6/2014 at 7:28 PM, perfexion said:

I get specialty pay as a traveler in L&D. My hourly pay is always more than med surg travel nurses at the same agency. L&D, ICU, ER and OR are the money makers in travel nursing.

Are the prices quoted on the travel nursing websites real or is there more to those numbers?

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