RNs Performing Housekeeping Duties!

[allsmiles]

do rns perform housekeeping duties where you work?

i got the shock of my life this week during clinicals. i escorted a female patient to the shower. after i helped the patient with the shower and returned her to her room, i proceeded to my next assigned patient.

my supervising co-nurse stopped me, and told me that i needed to clean the shower. she then walked me down the hall to the housekeeping closet and pointed out the correct bottle of disinfectant i needed to use. she then informed me of the written procedures for cleaning the shower [spray disinfectant on the walls, floors, etc. any surface that the patient may have come in contact with; wait a certain amount of time; then return and rinse the entire shower area down].

i am not a prima donna by any stretch of the imagination , but i naively thought that housekeeping did facility cleaning in the hospital.

well, i remained calm, and sprayed the shower down, but luckily by the time i returned to finish, housekeeping had already finished cleaning the shower.

so, my question to you is this:

are you required to do housekeeping tasks in your workplace?

was this just a power play by the co-nurse to humble the newbie?

am i just over-reacting?

all comments and opinions welcome! thanks! :kiss

[mattsmom81]

it's your choice alright. But remember, once you take it on it may just forever be your job. Remember SJoe's tagline.

Personally I have more than enough work to do for which I have an awesome responsibility. I prioritize where my liability dictates.

Housekeeping is low on my list unless it directly impacts my or my IMMEDIATE patient's wellbeing. (NOT future patients)

[SnowymtnRN]

Its one thing to do this occassionally cuz of short staffing, etc..but the general "concensus" to have to do it is unreasonable. Its a give and take. Nurses have GOT to stop working every aspect of the hospital, otherwise all management will do is stack more and more work on us for no extra money. Pretty soon we'll have to cook meals, clean all the bathrooms and toilets, AND do patient care. Not to mention, who wants a nurse to clean the bathroom AND do bedside care?

[RN-RD]

I think this can set a bad precedent. Nurses are always picking up the slack for other departments. If I am always doing somebody else's job, how can I do my own well?

Either housekeeping is too busy or the workers are not working hard enough. Either way the problem needs to be addressed. I have noticed that sometimes the more slack I pick up, the more slack I am expected to pick up which can be enabling to workers in other departments who have a challenged work ethic. If a housekeeper says "If I don't get there soon the nurse will do it, so I can take a longer lunch break", then I would be making the problem worse not better by cleaning the bed myself.

I am not saying that this is always the case, but it deserves consideration.

I remember the saying "Do something once as a favor and it becomes part of your job"

[ratchit]

Couldn't agree with you more, RD. It's not below me to clean, but nursing in in the position it's in because we allow ourselves to be used like that.

Doctors don't clean- they yank dressings off, toss them on the bed, then if we're lucky let the nurse know the dressing needs to be redone. (They never fail to pull them off 20 minutes after we've done them either. )

When dietary is short staffed, nursing has to pick up the slack. Same with lab, unit clerk, transport, etc. When we're short nurses, do any of these departments help us? No. Because they can't- they don't have the skills.

I have the necessary skills to enter orders and pass trays, but I don't have the time in my day to do their jobs. And once we find the time to do other people's jobs once, it becomes expected of us to find the time routinely.

I say no to performing housekeeping tasks not because it's beneath me- trust me, I clean dirtier messes than they do. I refuse because I haven't worked at a hospital yet that wouldn't make those tasks nursing's responsibility if they could get away with it.

A stable patient waiting for a transfer can wait for housekeeping. I have and would clean a room if I needed to make a bed for a code. I won't let a patient suffer, but I won't let it become routine, either.

[roxannekkb]

I agree. No housekeeping for me. In the last job I worked, nurses were still pulling trash in the NICU at night--because housekeeping, for some reason, didn't come in to do it. I absolutely refused. Staffing was so tight in that place that it squeaked, and there was NO unit clerk either. Sorry, no trash and linens for me. But some of the nurses would be docile enough to pull it, instead of demanding that the hospital send housekeeping in.

Same thing with cleaning isolettes and radiant warmers, after a baby was moved out of it.. At a different hospital, housekeeping decided that if they were going to clean them, then they needed more staff. So the admin tried to pawn the job onto nurses. I said no way, and I refused, as did a few other nurses. But of course, there were the martyrs who did it, rather than forcing administration to hire a few more housekeepers.

If nurses don't refuse, it just gets added into your job description. Next thing you know, nurses will be routinely mopping up the floors, and doing the laundry. Nurses need to be getting rid of excess work that can be done by someone else, not adding it on.

In the NICU, of course we didn't have to worry about cleaning bathrooms. But that would be my last day on the job, if someone told me that I had to clean the bathroom!

[Hellllllo Nurse, BSN, RN]

I work in a dialysis unit. There is no housekeeping.

As an RN, my assigned duties include: mopping floors, replacing paper towels, filling soap dispensers, cleaning the machines, emptying and bleaching trash cans and equipment, stocking supplies, etc.

We are even required to break-down the cardboard boxes in the warehouse.

When I worked at an inpt hospice, nursing duties included pooper-scooping the pts' pets.

Isn't this why nurses get college degrees?

[canoehead, BSN, RN]

Housekeeping is part of my job, but I put it absolutely dead last. Along with all the other non nursing, non pt care stuff. But they have a housekeeper on nights to do "floors" who doesn't clean rooms, or anything else. It's a splinter under my fingernail, but if I get upset about it it will only hurt me. I know that nothing will change no matter what I say, and there are lots of bigger issues.

[fergus51]

Housekeeping is not a part of my job. I have enough to do without taking on other people's tasks. It has been my experience that when you do, you wind up with people expecting you to do it all the time. I made that mistake as a fairly new nurse. Now that I am a little older, I don't have a problem with doing my job and making sure that other people do theirs. I have complete respect for housekeeping staff, but there is no way I am doing their work for them. I owe my patients more than that.

[Rapheal]

Originally posted by MD Terminator

I think whoever did the cost figures for this needs to be smacked.

You're telling me that it's better to pay an RN 20+ bucks an hour to clean a shower, when a housekeeper will do it for 6?

That's nuts!

No wonder we have a nursing shortage. All of the nurses are in the bathroom learning about scrubbing bubbles!

Dave

Why pay housekeeping when you can just add it to the nurses duties? The patients suffer. We need to be there to take care of them, to plan their care, to perfom teaching, to address their labs and to re-assess their condition. With the countless other tasks piled upon us it is getting harder and harder to do.

[Marie_LPN, RN, LPN, RN]

Forgot to mention that our maternity unit (antepartum, L and D, postpartum, nursery, etc) barely get housekeeping.

The RNs are the ones that keep the place clean. They make the beds, they clean the bathrooms, mop floors, stretchers, restock the rooms with linens and supplies, gather all trash and dirty linen, etc.

Only thing housekeeping is allowed to do is vacuum the hall carpet. The dirty linen and trash all go down to the basement in a chute.

[canoehead, BSN, RN]

And cleaning up after a horrendous pp bleed is SOOO much fun. Just the thing after being scared out of your mind.

[AuroraRN]

Well, I wouldn't work in a facility that expected me to mop the floors!!! Oh, and I wouldn't clean the shower either! I barely have time to take a break myself than to do other's jobs for them! As some before me have said, once you take on another's duties, it is usually then expected that you will ALWAYS do those duties. Just my opinion, though.