Solution for high census days

[nitasarn]

I don't know how active the board is anymore, but I had a questions /or more so need insight into how we manage high census days in urgent care. Right now all UC are staff with 1 FNP, 1 RN, and 1 radiology tech. Which is fine during the week. But on the weekends or on holidays you can expect to see 30-40pt a day. We have multiple meetings about it but no one seems to have a solution. (Right now, were stuck to making phone calls to staff who is off that day, to see if anyone wants to come in, and I think the staff is getting sick of it). My solution would be to staff 2 NPs. But right now, it doesn't seems like that's what management is wanting to do, probably because of costs. It started off as one UC, now we have 3 that have opened or will be opening all within this year.

Thanks

[VickyRN, MSN, DNP, RN]

Document, document, document. Leave a clear audit trail of the patient patterns during these "off" weekend hours, and how customer service could be improved by an extra NP staffing the clinic during these heavy usage times. Perhaps an NP could be designated "on call" for situations of high census, or an NP could be scheduled to come in part of a shift, during times that have shown a very heavy patient load.