Which specialties have 3 pts/nurse or less?

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Hello to all,

In your experience, which nursing specialties/or hospital units have assignments of 3 patients per nurse or less?

Thanks :)

Specializes in CEN, CPEN, RN-BC.
The best ratio that I have personally seen for the ER, on paper at least, is 3:1 with a critical patient, and 4:1 without. Of course, we all know that when the census is up and nurses are few, that ratio can go up in a heartbeat.

The ER where I work is a 29 bed department and the ratio is minimum of 5:1 with only 1 tech for the entire department. Plus, we don't have a tube system, so we often have to run our own specimens to the lab or go to the pharmacy to pick medications.

Wow... no tube system.. that sucks. Our ratio is 5:1... which becomes 6:1 very quickly. Not safe IMO, especially for a trauma center.

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Specializes in neurology, cardiology, ED.

In the ER where I work you theoretically have 3-4 patients at most. But once they start putting stretchers up and down the hall, all bets are off!

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Specializes in Med/Surg, DSU, Ortho, Onc, Psych.

Maybe midwifery, don't know.

However, it's unrealistic in nursing to expect a 3:1 ratio - you may BEGIN with 3, but you always get new admissions, people moved from other wards, trauma cases, etc.

I don't think you would find many jobs where you just ever have 3 patients. 4-6 seems to be the usual number.

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Specializes in Mostly: Occup Health; ER; Informatics.

Occupational health. Most often 1:1 or sometimes 1:2, with time to actually do teaching and focused care.

Although... there was that chemical exposure incident, when it was 1:45. One then learns the true meaning of "field triage".

But just try to find an occ health job...the best specialty but virtually no open positions.

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