What's your on-call schedule?

[buckmarko]

Would any of you mind sharing your on call schedule for your department? Ours has been in place for a while. I think management is looking for ideas. I am not in management, but I wouldn't mind presenting them with something that would work for our department. We are not a trauma center, but we do staff 24 hours. We are also located in a fairly large city with 6-7 other hospitals. We have around 12 rooms we run daily. I am looking for daily, nightly, weekend, and holiday call schedules, and how often you are on call. Thanks for any input!

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

I'm a member of a specialty team that covers call only for our specialty. We take a full 16 hour call shift from end of scheduled shift to beginning of next once or twice a week. We also cover second call once or twice a week- scheduled to be 2 hours but if cases are still going and the primary call team can't relieve, we have to stay beyond that. One weekend a month, but there's a lot of flexibility that we can request not to be on call. Downside is that we never know which weekend of the month we're on call until the schedule comes out.

The rest of the OR takes call for whatever comes in except my specialty. We don't divide out by specialty- the call teams are responsible for being able to do it all. One 8 hour shift per week (sometimes less as there's more people than call shifts) and every third weekend- divided into 3 teams and weekend schedule comes out at the beginning of the year. Holidays sometimes have teams flipping places so that it's not exactly every three weekends.

Everyone is responsible for one summer and one winter holiday. Memorial Day, Labor Day, July 4, thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years are considered the only holidays.

[mhy12784]

Were a small 10 room community hospital.

They just started a 3-7pm call shift (basically it allows them to run more rooms after the day shift goes home despite having an evening staff too)

Then they have a 11pm-7am shift weekdays

And weekends just consists of a mix of 8/12 hour call shifts to cover it

[heather42r]

Ours is M-F 1530-0700 the next morning and 0700-0700 Sat/Sun. Heart is staffed separately and they do their own scheduling.

We also cover OB call on a separate call schedule because L&D "doesn't do c-sections" and that runs the same hours. We only have 8 nurses so we are on call a lot right now plus the late shift (1200-2030) nurse quit so we have to cover his shift (until 1830) in addition to our own plus the 2 call rosters. They hired someone to take that shift but they still have to take the NCLEX so assuming all goes well, this will be a bit before it's covered!