Staffing on C&A inpatient psych unit

Specialties Psychiatric

Published

Those of you that work on C&A inpatient acute psych units, what is your current staffing matrix (specific numbers per census)/HPPD and/or staffing guidelines? I've presented some literature to our management re: appropriate levels, but they'd also like to know what other units are doing.

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Specializes in Pediatrics,Adult/Pediatric Psychiatry.

I work in a 40 bed inpatient unit and our matrix is 4 nurses and 4 PCAs. Extra staff is on for 1:1s. Unfortunately, this is not always safe depending on acuity of patients and sometimes its only staffed with 1 male PCA staff member. Oh well...such is life...

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Specializes in Geriatric Psychiatry.

I worked at an psych icu/geriatric unit. We had 14 beds. Our ratio was 2 nurses and two mhs/ca to 14 pt. Below 12pt is 2 nurses one mhs/ca. Hope this helps.

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NurseKris is your unit a child and adolescent unit? I can only use data from these units due to the specialty and them usually requiring more staff.

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Specializes in Psych.

I work at a 43 bed free standing psych facility. 23 of those beds are C&A. Days and evenings we're staffed at 4 nurses and 7 MHAs (psych techs or what have you). Two of those nurses are dedicated to C&A, a med nurse and a unit nurse. The other 2 are adult. The children's unit gets 2 staff adolescent gets 2 and then there's a float that goes between all units. Our staffing doesn't start to drop until we reach 35 pts in the whole hospital, then we go to 3 nurses and 6 staff and from there it drops accordingly. On weekends it's always 3 nurses and 6 staff on days and evenings. 2 nurses on nights regardless of the census or day of the week.

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Specializes in Pediatrics,Adult/Pediatric Psychiatry.

My unit is an adult unit, ages 18 and over.

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