Single Patient Rooms

[rocrn06]

Our current unit is a 60 bed unit made up of Pods with 6 patients per pod. We are moving soon to single patient rooms. We will have two units after the move. There will be 42 single patient rooms in the new tower and the remainder will be in another unit temporarily while our current unit is renovated.

My question is how do other single patient room units run the day to day operations? How are patients assigned? How is report, and assignments given? How are breaks and lunches done? We will have alarms that will go to our phones, how do you find this to work? Our staff is very close, many like family. How do you feel the relationships are in single patient rooms? How do you make new staff feel welcome and get to know everyone?

I would love to hear any advice and information you can share.

[babyNP., APRN]

You can do a search on this topic- it's been discussed before.

I moved from a pod-like set up you described over to private room as a RN and our staff loved it. It took some getting used to, but it was awesome for parents, the patients, and I think us as well. One problem we ran into was that it was pretty easy to know if your people in your "pod" were drowning and you could go help without being asked. In private rooms, people may not know, so you have to tell your new RNs to tell the charge nurse when they are starting to drown- which isn't easy for them sometimes as they want to be able to do it themselves. And of course some experienced RNs are guilty of this too

also, be sure to talk to your babies when you're in the room. there was a study done showing less language development of babies in single rooms and I suspect that it's largely because of lack of conversation that naturally occurs in a pod versus you silently assessing your baby and feeding them. Babies need to have that social interaction (as appropriate with their health status)- so I always talked to my babies once I read that article.