Staffing

That sounds unsafe and maybe you should bring it up doing a staff meeting. I am sure the other nurses are feeling the same way that you are. Good luck!

Back in the day we seldom had no laboring patients...but it did happen on a rare occasion. We maintained 2 L&D nurses in the hospital with a scrub tech even if their were no L&D patients, to respond quickly to emergencies. The nurses, however, did not sit in an empty unit...they were reassigned to other departments where they were staff "boosters", meaning that they provided assistance with nursing duties...did not have an actual patient assignment...and were available to be called to the L&D stat for a patient. If there were scrub techs in the hospital for other OR cases the OB scrub was not necessarily kept and could be given a low census shift. Sometimes we would have a couple of delivered women and babies but no active laboring patients so one RN would stay and care for those and the other would go off and work elsewhere, come back and relieve, etc. Nobody really liked this and it is clearly not ideal but it worked pretty well when we needed to implement it.

i dont work in OB, but i know at my hospital, there is 2 RN's on the OB unit even when there are no pts. they do not float to anywhere in the building as OB, peds, and psych are considered "closed units" and they dont have to float to us and we dont have to float to them. if an emergency up there arises, there is always the ER doc, hospitalist, and Medics in the ER to assist

We are a small unit but it is all encompassing - L&D, PP and nursery. We usually only have 2 RNs at night and then a couple of LVNs, no scrub tech. If there are no L&D pt's they will cut the LVNs and leave the RNs. If there is absolutely no one on the floor they will leave the 2 RNs to hang out and wait for someone to pop up. Every now and then one of the RNs calls out and then you have 1 RN and some laboring PTs, horribly unsafe and scary. So I think 2 RNs and a scrub tech is pure gold.