Weekend Call time

[obrngbpackers]

Hello, I am writing this for some in sight as to how other units handle the influx of babies that come and go, particularly in the summer in a Community Hospital. I work at a hospital that handles 70-90 births a month. Our staffing is all done together for Labor/Mother Baby/Special Care nursery. We sometimes get transfer backs and feeder growers from high acuity hospitals. Routinely we pick up call as needed, every six weeks to fill in for vacations and FMLA coverages. This brings us up to our "par" which is usually 5 on nights and weekends and 6-7 on days. It is nice that we all work together and can swing our staffing around a bit, but, as you all know at 3 pm on a Saturday in July...it is busy.

It seems as of late we can not get extra help for those times when we send out our "SOS calls". It has not been in issue to get extra help when we need it during the week. Some ideas that have been brought up are:

If someone calls off on a weekend, they pick up call the next weekend. Our unit really doesn't have a problem with call offs so this isn't really necessary.

Another option is putting out an additional call schedule and asking everyone to pick up 1 twelve hour weekend shift. Fri night, Sat night/day, Sun night/day in addition to our regular call. These would be bringing us above "our par". So, essentially we will have two call lists...one of the complaints was that someone could get stuck doing a lot of weekends depending when it was their turn to sign up, so it was suggested to keep the two lists seperate...we rotate our regular call time sign up and pick up in 4 hours slots which is nice because you don't have to give away your whole day if you don't want to.

Any Ideas how to solve this problem? Having a traveler is not an option. Our next NPC meeting is coming up soon

[MotherToPeanut]

I worked in an OB department that had it written into their contract that if a nurse called off for a weekend shift, he or she would have to make up that shift within the next 2 weeks at the manager's discretion. It worked well to prevent weekend absences. There was also a call weekend rotation. Each nurse was assigned an "on call weekend", approximately once every thirteen weeks. That nurse's regular shifts were scheduled during the week and then they were responsible for either day or night shift call depending on which shift they usually worked. They received time and a half for any hours worked during their call weekend. It was nice to know that a backup nurse was available if the department was really busy. That hospital did approximately 30 deliveries per month.