Yesterday I was floated to a hospital I had never been to before. I walked through a new wing, past a lobby with a fountain, into new, single-patient rooms fitted with Alexa to assist you with paging your nurse... and every nurse had 5 or 6 patients on dayshift. Ortho/trauma patients, confused/withdrawing patients, not a single independent one on the entire floor. Pain meds were late, q2 turns didn't happen, getting out of bed happened for the most part only when PT showed up. I'm so glad when the change of shift admission from the ED came in, confused, restrained, covered in blood, that required 6 staff members to get settled, that we had Alexa on the walls, because certainly that was more important to patient care than us having another nurse.
Yesterday I was floated to a hospital I had never been to before. I walked through a new wing, past a lobby with a fountain, into new, single-patient rooms fitted with Alexa to assist you with paging your nurse... and every nurse had 5 or 6 patients on dayshift. Ortho/trauma patients, confused/withdrawing patients, not a single independent one on the entire floor. Pain meds were late, q2 turns didn't happen, getting out of bed happened for the most part only when PT showed up. I'm so glad when the change of shift admission from the ED came in, confused, restrained, covered in blood, that required 6 staff members to get settled, that we had Alexa on the walls, because certainly that was more important to patient care than us having another nurse.