Wanting to gather information on work settings in hospitals across the province

dayandnight · Feb 24, 2016

I am a RN practicing in BC, lower mainland.

After meeting and briefly speaking with a cardiac nurse from Alberta and Nova Scotia, I have noticed that each province has big differences in how the nurses practice but their healthcare system is also vastly different (BC has MSP while other provinces have healthcare paid from their taxes etc)

I wanted to see how nursing, esp patient assignments and unit settings vary across the province. This is just out of curiosity and since I am also thinking of relocating after gaining 2-3 years exp in a medical unit, and Canadian nursing information is so hard to find. It might also be valuable information for those who are also interested in working in a different province in the future.

If interested, if any nurse can share their Province, Unit setting, Hospital size (# beds), and Unit/specialty they are working in, and we can have a conflict-free discussion, that would be great-

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I'll start first, I work at two hospitals casually as a RN in the Medicine Unit.

One hospital has 100+ beds and we have 10 patients between 1 RN and 1 LPN. (We do get a workload nurse if we have enough staffing) We just have one Patient Care Coordinator until 4:30pm and afterwards one of the unit RNs have her full assignments and also become a Charge Nurse

We have 1 Care aid for approx 30 patients and they also work as porters until the afternoon. Afterwards all nurses need to porter their own patients for emergency situations, admit their own patients from the ER, ICU etc. On the weekend we have 1 care aid for the entire medicine unit of 90+ patients. and they also work as porters.

The other hospital I work in has 300+ acute beds

We have 1 care aids for 20 patients and they work until 11pm at night. We also have a porter system so nurses don't porter their own patients. Patients are much more acute in this hospital compared to above and we also do peritoneal dialysis. Other Medicine Unit does trach care etc.

Our assignment is 10-11 patients for 1 RN and 1 LPN. Same thing as above for PCC and Charge nursing. Our charge RN takes same patient assignment as any other nurse.