Vanderbilt Medical Center to have nurses cleaning up

Published

"Cleaning the room after the case, including pulling your trash and mopping the floor, are all infection-prevention strategies. And it's all nursing, and it's all surgical tech. You may not believe that, but even Florence Nightingale knew that was true," said a hospital administrator to staff in a video obtained by the Channel 4 I-Team."

http://www.wsmv.com/story/23364976/vanderbilt-medical-center-to-have-nurses-cleaning-up

No wonder so many nurses are leaving or planning to leave nursing. And the soon to be new grads are so eager...for a while :(

Up Vote Up Vote ×

Magnet...pfft

Up Vote Up Vote ×

I read through a lot of the comments and was shocked that not one person sided with the facility or in-between. I work for a major hospital and our unit itself (nurses included) help to clean and strip the rooms especially if someone was in there that had AIDS or staph. For them to ask the nurses to strip the rooms I'm sure there was legitimate reason and their patient turnover rate and stuff was probably considered. If there is two hours between your discharge and new admit......come on what are you doing all that time. Do you want them to lay off the nurses instead and keep the housekeepers.

Up Vote Up Vote ×

"...Assistant Vice Chancellor John Howser, said: "All decisions... are being made in a patient-centric manner ...""

If this is what "patient-centric" means (to give nurses extra work without extra time or extra staff), I hope any hospital I ever go to isn't "patient-centric".

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Oncology.
I read through a lot of the comments and was shocked that not one person sided with the facility or in-between. I work for a major hospital and our unit itself (nurses included) help to clean and strip the rooms especially if someone was in there that had AIDS or staph. For them to ask the nurses to strip the rooms I'm sure there was legitimate reason and their patient turnover rate and stuff was probably considered. If there is two hours between your discharge and new admit......come on what are you doing all that time. Do you want them to lay off the nurses instead and keep the housekeepers.

Most people are catching up on charting and take care of their other 5-7 patients between their discharge and admit. We've always been responsible for stripping linen and supplies out of the room. The aid usually does it, but it's a very quick job I'm okay with. We don't do any cleaning and don't even have access to cleaning supplies outside of disinfectant wipes.

Further, I think this article is referencing daily cleaning too. I'd like to see them manage some of those 2 million dollar salaries listed eerily before laying anyone off.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Critical Care/Vascular Access.
I read through a lot of the comments and was shocked that not one person sided with the facility or in-between. I work for a major hospital and our unit itself (nurses included) help to clean and strip the rooms especially if someone was in there that had AIDS or staph. For them to ask the nurses to strip the rooms I'm sure there was legitimate reason and their patient turnover rate and stuff was probably considered. If there is two hours between your discharge and new admit......come on what are you doing all that time. Do you want them to lay off the nurses instead and keep the housekeepers.

I don't know what kind of unit you work on......but where I'm at those 2 hours you MIGHT have between patients leaving and coming are extremely valuable for charting, catching up on dressing changes or other duties you may have had to delay or even (heaven forbid!) a few minutes to pee and eat lunch. After a patient leaves, especially isolation patients, a good room cleaning would require about an hour, and if you can routinely spare on hour at your job, I'm jealous, but you should be aware that's a rarity for most of us work in med/surg settings at major hospitals in big cities.

Up Vote Up Vote ×

I work on a busy ortho/neuro unit. Nurse to patient ratio is usually 6:1 and sometimes 8:1. We rarely have 2 hours between a DC and an admit. I'm usually DC'ing a patient and w/in half an hour admitting another one. Our ANM's do all they can to space out the admits, but the logistics of it can get hairy. With direct admits, ED admits, and Recoveries you stay crazy busy all the time. Granted, electronic charting in our facility has expedited the process somewhat. That being said, a direct or ED admission takes roughly 90 minutes to do and a recovery patient takes about 45 minutes when you factor in interruptions/medications.

We are required to take all tubing from the IV pumps & take them to the soiled linen room, if they are in precautions the nurse is also required to disinfect it w/ Cavi wipes or Dispatch. Same goes for PCA pumps and wound vacs. I regularly empty trash & generally attempt to keep a room relatively neat while I am in the room with the patient, regardless of what that entails. I am baffled as to why the PTB (powers that be) think that nurses doing housekeeping on a consistent basis is effective? With Vandy being Magnet and therefore EBP based, I am curious to know what research said that this was a good idea?

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in kids.

Wow...all I can say is wow...and wonder how they will have time to meet the "Customer Satisfaction" parameters......food, remote controls, pillow fluffing.....

Really, who cares about the vital sign parameters for medications?

Who cares about the potentioal for the increase is noscomial infections?

What will the answers be in Utilization Review when Medicare is screaming/not paying for a re admit that might have been prevented witht he appropriate nursing interventions happening?

And the FLorence reference? Wow, so glad I do not work there!

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Emergency.
Government healthcare at it's best. I'll be it 's not like that at the private pay facilities.

This country is in for a BIG SURPRISE when Obama care "Rolls out" completely

I think what Katie describes is actually a problem with a two-tier system, not a single payer system. I work for government healthcare, and have no cleaning responsibilities. Also, from another thread here on AN I see that my patient ratios are a lot better than those of every American poster who has participated.

When you are funneling a large portion of your resources into a system that only some of the population is accessing, the system that remains for the rest of the country is going to be stretched thin, this being why I am involved in healthcare activism at home to prevent my province from trying to go with the two-tier model.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Certified Med/Surg tele, and other stuff.

I know with our ISO rooms the housekeepers are up on ladders taking down the curtains and hanging new ones once the room is clean. They wash down the window and scrub that room. It takes an hour or so, easily.

We are responsible for cleaning up the room upon discharge. We strip the beds, clean pumps and throw away IV stuff. That is fine by me as it helps turn over the rooms quicker. But don't ask me to clean a room. That, I don't have time for.

Of course my previous hospital laid off lab techs and trained the housekeepers to draw stat labs. The lab would draw the morning labs but anything after that, the nurse was to notify the housekeeper and have them do it. Their training was approx. 1 hour on a rubber arm. That lasted about 3 weeks, tops. So Vandy isn't the only idiot on the block.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Critical Care, Education.

OH MY GAW!!!

I am having flashbacks to the "Patient Centered Care" fiasco of the 90's....

I actually had to develop a training program for "multi-skilled workers" during that awful time. We (me & 3 other nurse educators with advanced degrees) went through housekeeper training, along with training for the other 3 jobs (phlebotomy, dietary aide & transporter) that were supposed to be included in the new position .. housekeeping was by far the most difficult an complex. In order to be effective (avoiding cross-contamination) everything has to be done in a specific sequence, & there are different materials for each type of surface to be cleaned.... sheesh. The outcome of our multi-skilled (~ $1mill later)? The job was not do-able, particularly by the people who were hired into it at that salary range....

But (to me) the consequences of this Vandy 'experiment' are very clear. Nurses will always prioritize patient care over everything else. When time is short, "cleaning" will never be slapdash at best. They will not be able to devote the 20 uninterrupted minutes it takes to clean a room like it should be done. Can you imagine trying to carve out time for this - including donning all the PPE and such - and still meet the needs of the other 6 patients you're caring for? Not gonna happen.

The Patient-Centered care craze died an ignominious death, but not before 100's of millions were expended on 'experts' and 'consultants' and salaries of executives who were in charge of implementing this "evolutionary new type of efficient patient care"..... yeah, right.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Acute Mental Health.

I have heard that a large hospital has done away with their Housekeeping department and now the nurses will be cleaning the rooms and doing housekeeping duties. I can't imagine having a full load, discharging a patient, find out your getting a new admit, and having to clean the room beforehand. Meanwhile down the hall one of your patients is heading south...... Anyone of hear of this? Thoughts?

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Join the Discussion