ratio limits in Oklahoma?
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I've been at a hospital for 4 months now and am working on a general medical floor. Like every facility, there are problems. However, there have been a lot of staffing issues that scare me. I recently had a day when I was assigned 9 patients at the start of shift, with an LPN taking the team with me. However, our facility doesn't allow LPNs to administer any medications through central lines of any kind or ports and 5 of the 9 had this type of access. She also had broken her wrist the night before and was extremely limited in being able to administer medication. They are also not allowed to do assessments, admissions or discharges. Over the course of the day, I had 5 discharges, 2 admissions from ER and an ICU transfer. 3 of my patients got blood tranfusions oredered within about 1 hour of each other and my LPN couldn't do those either. I kept asking for help and was told they couldn't do it. But we had one nurse who had been on-call all day and another that was sent home in the middle of the shift because she had discharged her whole team! The 3 transfusions were insane, along with my other patients who were all very acute (no walky-talky patients here!) I've never had such a situation where I was asking for help and refused because "you have an LPN with you" but she was barely able to function and I made this known. I was NOT safe that day, broke down twice in tears. I can't find any info about ratios in Oklahoma. Does anybody know about patient limits? I've talked to several people who say their facility has limits on the number of blood transfusions that can do at the same time while taking care of other patients. We don't have that. This is not an isolated incident, but is my most recent. I'm taking my concerns to administration but was wondering about other facilities.
Sorry this is long, I've just been very upset about the working conditions and staffing lately.