Step down units: what's your ratio?

[ixchel]

In your facility, what is your patient ratio on your step down unit(s)? Do you have individual specialty units? (Like, neuro, cardiac, etc.) Or is it general?

[New ICU RN]

I work in a small facility and our ICU is its own. Step down. We typically have several patients who are critical and we bump them down from critical to intermediate to acute. Typically once a patient reaches acute, we can send them to msu.

[sugarmagnoliaRN]

I work intermediate care/progressive care at a large teaching hospital; our ratio is usually 1:4, occasionally 1:3 but we can go up to 5 depending on the situation. We don't have any vents or art lines, but we do deal with a lot of drips (milrinone, dobutamine, epi, dopamine, insulin) as long as we aren't titrating. Our population is mostly cardiac (we get CHF, post-PCI, cardiac surgery, thoracic surgery) with the occasional med-surg patient (eg. PE) but we get them transferred to the proper area when a bed becomes available.

[sugarmagnoliaRN]

Just realized my comment about drips was a bit confusing - obviously we do titrate the insulin drips, just not any of the cardiac meds since we don't have any invasive hemodynamic monitoring!

[PacoUSA, BSN, RN]

I work intermediate care/progressive care at a large teaching hospital; our ratio is usually 1:4, occasionally 1:3 but we can go up to 5 depending on the situation. We don't have any vents or art lines, but we do deal with a lot of drips (milrinone, dobutamine, epi, dopamine, insulin) as long as we aren't titrating. Our population is mostly cardiac (we get CHF, post-PCI, cardiac surgery, thoracic surgery) with the occasional med-surg patient (eg. PE) but we get them transferred to the proper area when a bed becomes available.

I'm amazed. I do basically everything you described on my cardiac tele unit and we are not considered a stepdown :/