Questions to ask at interview for womens health floor

[Guest321574]

Well I have an interview tomorrow for an RN position on a women's health floor. They take gyn and general surgery pts, oncology pts and MB overflow. I'm kind of at a loss as to what would be good questions to ask that are specific to this type of floor. Any ideas?

PS- I really want this job (and not just because I need a job!) so any other helpful tips would be greatly appreciated :)

[nfahren05]

Not having ever heard of such a floor, that's a tricky one. There is such a huge difference between the postpartum PIH patient and an ovarian cancer patient receiving chemotherapy that it seems a bit odd for them to be grouped together (although it's not unusual for a mother/baby unit to house routine post-hysterectomy patients.) I would imagine that most nurses would come from having either oncology or maternity experience, but not both, so inquiring as to the amount of orientation that could be expected to address the weaker clinical area would be appropriate. I would certainly want to ask whether antepartum patients would be on that unit, or if they would be exclusively referred to L&D. Are the babies of the postpartum patients also going to be your patients, or will they be cared for by the nursery (or NICU) staff? Those are just a couple of things to watch for, I'm sure other posters will have additional ideas.

[Guest321574]

I think the MB overflow is truly just for times when the normal MB unit is full. So its probably not very frequent that they get postpartum women/babes. I'm pretty sure there will be no antepartum (though I would love it if there were!), but that is a good question I think, never can hurt to verify :wink2:

Thanks, that is a good start for me :)

[mitchsmom]

"I think the MB overflow is truly just for times when the normal MB unit is full. So its probably not very frequent that they get postpartum women/babes."

There's one of your questions right there! We used to have an overflow area before our LDRP was split into separate L&D and Postpartum units... some probably would have said that "it's just when LDRP is full" - but in reality that was quite frequently (which is precisely why we split). I would ask how many MB overflows in a typical day/ week.

Ask if you can shadow a nurse on the unit and see how things feel to you, and ask that nurse questions as they arise, too.

This might seem funny but you may want to even ask if men are ever on the unit if that is something you'd like to know about... in our current overflow area, in the WOMEN'S & Children's unit... does sometimes have MEN. They try to keep it all women, clean sugical, etc. but sometimes there ends up being men, chest pain, occasionally "unclean"/contagious conditions...

Those are some of the gripes that I see...

Also I agree with nfahren05 in general.