What is it like in your hospital right now?

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I'm PRN and have been on call because of low census. I know we have COVID and r/o COVID patients; I'm actually "assigned" to the COVID floor, but because of my status + elective surgeries canceled + people avoiding the hospital, our census is low.

I wonder what it will look like a week or 2 from now.

In the Denver Metro area for reference!

We are at 40+ positive patients and 20+ rule outs. For reference, my hospital isn’t very big. Just over 200 beds. My anxiety is through the roof.?

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4 hours ago, PeachyERNurse said:

We are at 40+ positive patients and 20+ rule outs. For reference, my hospital isn’t very big. Just over 200 beds. My anxiety is through the roof.?

what part of the country are you in? seems to be a lot of hard hit specific pockets and then a lot of us waiting for it.

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On 3/30/2020 at 7:48 AM, ClaraRedheart said:

We had fewer patients on COVID isolation on Friday and Saturday than we did on Monday. I'm frankly sick of it. If our patient numbers are decreasing in the hospital, the community should be lifting some restrictions. I have friends and family who have lost jobs. I have co-workers who have been pushed and are losing their PTO. I am lucky that I'm precepting right now, so they can't push me. To COVID: Pee or get off the pot. I'm ready to get this over with. Maybe the warmer weather really is making a difference? I

Um, no. The incubation period is 2 weeks. You're looking at a decrease over 2 days. If your patient numbers are decreasing, then one of two things is happening. 1) you're still in the calm before the storm and it will ramp up. 2) the isolation is WORKING, so don't send people out to mingle and infect each other.

A lot of people have reported a calm before the storm in hospitals all across the country. Hospitals empty out - elective surgeries are cancelled. People voluntarily choose to stay home when they would normally go to ED just to get checked out and doctors are more judicious about whom they admit (yeah, we're not seeing BS admissions for things like diarrhea x2 anymore).

I, too, have friends and family who have lost jobs. I, too, have been down staffed or put on call. Many of our PRN staff have had their shifts drastically reduced. My kids have all been at home for 2 1/2 weeks, with no end in sight, and we had the first screaming, crying "my sister is just so annoying, I can't take it anymore" tantrum of the day at 7:06 this morning. They will lose months of education, and I, frankly, suck at homeschooling my ADHD kid.

But now we're seeing a ramp up. Now we're rationing PPE. Now we're starting to see colleagues quit rather than risk COVID infection.

I would LOVE to go back to a few weeks ago when we were "overreacting" with our shut downs, and the economic pain seemed disproportionate to the threat.

Because the time to shut things down is BEFORE you see a wave of patients at the hospital. If your community has the opportunity to do containment rather than mitigation, TAKE IT.

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3 hours ago, SansNom said:

what part of the country are you in? seems to be a lot of hard hit specific pockets and then a lot of us waiting for it.

Metro Atlanta. The whole state has 3,000 cases so nowhere near as hard hit as other locations.

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Specializes in FNP- Urgent Care.
On 3/30/2020 at 5:46 PM, SansNom said:

Current research is showing that it can be potentially rendered airborne for UP TO 3 hours after an aerosolizing treatment or procedure. It doesn't just have an allotted 3 hours of random air time it gets to use at will(haha, sorry, that thought just made me laugh). Most aerosol generating procedures and treatments are ICU specific that most med/surg nurses won't be exposed to (you can Google these pretty quickly).

Aside from the those specific situations, it is a droplet transmitted virus, and a surgical mask will suffice. I know many of you don't believe anything we're being told anymore, with some good reason, but I personally believe this particular bit of information and feel comfortable with a surgical mask unless I'm caring for a patient in the ICU receiving these treatments. I wash my hands frequently, of course, am very mindful of touching my face while at work, and then clean myself thoroughly when I get home.

In the situations we are caring for ICU patients receiving aersolizing treatments (in my hospital anyway) we are provided with N95s and much more protective gear. We have also converted quite a large number of rooms to be negative pressure so these droplets that have been rendered airborne are not just floating all over the hallway.

What is also aerosolizing and related to med-surg nurses is nebulizers...

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My hospital has 2 covid icus and 2 covid medsurgs. Multiple codes, multiple deaths, some people getting better. I haven’t worked on my cardiac Telly floor for 2 weeks, been working as a runner for ICU.
They started out being very hard core not allowing us to wear masks in hallways or patient rooms unless in precautions. They threatened to walk people out for inappropriate use of ppe. Lots of us (including me) were exposed at this time. Now all RN get an n95, good for 4 days of wear (yeah, right, I know.) We can wear home made masks over droplet masks. We can wear p100 if we buy our own. I feel much better about ppe and my hospital now.

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I am nursing covid patients and we are only been supplied with surgical masks! no hair cover /no shoe cover. one set of goggles u must keep cleaning yourself and keep …...…………….I don't know what to do ,I've expressed my concern to everyone, all on deaf ears though

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Specializes in 20.
On 3/29/2020 at 12:12 PM, SICUMurse123 said:

I reckon with everybody having a "low census", it's a good time to be in Critical Care. I pulled 115hrs last pay period and will likely do the same this pay period. They are begging us to work and paying us well to do so. We are on Critical Care divert as all of our units are full w/ COVID patients and we get called to the floors multiple times a day to look at patients that usually end up needing Critical Care services... Unless ED patients are absolutely dying, we are transferring them out. We have finally got some other hospitals to accept our patients.

Most insane thing I've ever seen in my life. Luckily, we got multiple truckloads of supplies recently. We are doing our best to conserve our supplies and are re-using PPE, but we do have it readily available.

Where are u?

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Specializes in 20.
On 3/29/2020 at 12:12 PM, SICUMurse123 said:

I reckon with everybody having a "low census", it's a good time to be in Critical Care. I pulled 115hrs last pay period and will likely do the same this pay period. They are begging us to work and paying us well to do so. We are on Critical Care divert as all of our units are full w/ COVID patients and we get called to the floors multiple times a day to look at patients that usually end up needing Critical Care services... Unless ED patients are absolutely dying, we are transferring them out. We have finally got some other hospitals to accept our patients.

Most insane thing I've ever seen in my life. Luckily, we got multiple truckloads of supplies recently. We are doing our best to conserve our supplies and are re-using PPE, but we do have it readily available.

Where are u?

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Specializes in 20.

The CDC is reporting over 5000 deaths to dste. I look on this forum and read the stories, it doesn't appear that is possible? Thoughts?

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Specializes in Cardiac PCU, ER.

I'm in a small 150 bed hospital that has a negative pressure wing earmarked for Covid and it hasn't opened to patients yet. Positive Covid patients go to the bigger sister hospital with 4 times the beds. My regular job is as a Nurse Tech on PCU. The census is so low, many are getting put on call. I'm actually in that "tweener" stage of just graduating nursing school in a few weeks and trying to land my first RN job, but I am concerned of perhaps an RN hiring freeze until things get back to normal. My saving grace is positioning myself to get as many hours as I can by training new CNAs, but with NCLEX testing dates/sites up in the air....I'm worried about now having to compete with veteran RNs entering the hospitals as their outpatient services have stopped or slowed dramatically. It's unfortunate because with the hospital being so slow at the moment, it's a perfect time for myself and other new grads to be mentored by someone. I just want to work as a full time RN and not being picky about what job at this point. So far so good with PPE, but my area only has 51 positive cases as of right now and 16 hospitalized.

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.
1 hour ago, Texasmama72 said:

The CDC is reporting over 5000 deaths to dste. I look on this forum and read the stories, it doesn't appear that is possible? Thoughts?

Many areas have yet to see a peak. Take a look at what is happening in New York City- they had to bring in 85 refrigerated trucks to manage bodies. I would bet that most of us still posting haven’t been hit by the worst yet. Those who are seeing the worst probably need to step away and/or are absolutely exhausted between shifts and aren’t posting.

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