What do you do...

Nurses General Nursing

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What do you do when there are no patients (ER), or on the floor when all your pt care is done?

I know there are lots of places that these two things never happen at, but I also know there are plenty of places that do have down time when pt care is done.

Specializes in Trauma, Teaching.

Online CEUs for me too. Our inhouse required modules pop up year round, so keeping on top of those is easier. They also offer a lot of optional CEUs, for free, so I have 2/3 of my required hours already done. There is only so much stocking and cleaning I can do, while sitting in the box in triage, somebody has to be there for whatever walks in the door. I've even gotten the wipes out and scrubbed down the wheel chairs and the seats in the lobby.

Our ER is usually inundated, especially when there are no inhouse beds and we are boarding lots of people overnight. Our staffing goes down no matter how many patients are in the dept. at certain hours through the night. Rarely, as in none in the last few months, we get a medsurg nurse assigned to us to take the holds. That being said, there have been some nights where we got down to about 6, and half of them were psych pts waiting for consult in the morning.

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Honestly, I just goof off and surf the web.

As do many.

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Specializes in NICU/Neonatal transport.

All of the above. Sometimes goof off, sometimes on here, and I do tend to read a lot of journal articles in downtime. I have more downtime than many because often my role at night is a transport NP, so basically I'm just on call in house, with a call room. I make sure none of my colleagues need help with anything, but if none of them need anything and I'm caught up on my CEUs, modules etc, I surf and look for interesting journal articles. I also have 3-4 projects I'm working on in the background. Some of them I'm not great at doing in a fast manner, but I keep plugging away!

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Specializes in M/S, Pulmonary, Travel, Homecare, Psych..

I do have down time, but no enough that I can immerse myself into anything. Honestly, I've stopped playing phone games that can't be paused because as soon as I think I'm about to have fifteen minutes down time and start playing...........

"Can I have a wash cloth?"........................"Why did my doctor change my meds?"..........."Is my husband cheating on me?"........................

I work on a psych unit and most of our patients have sleep disturbance. There rarely is a time when ALL OF THEM are in bed comfortable and happy.

So I guess that's my answer. I humor patients.

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