The unit secretary does ours, which doesn't make sense to me. Unless the secretary is sitting in report how would she/he know the clinical condition of the patients as well as the skills and time needed to perform care if the patients? For example, it would make sense to assign the same nurse to two MRSA patients in the same room, rather than split the assignment so the nurses are going back and forth into non-MRSA rooms. Sometimes nurses are overburdened with a line up of patients requiring trach care, dressing changes, and other treatments, while other nurses have low-maintenance patients. As long as I'm going there I might as well add the secretaries on our unit practically run the place, ordering nurses around and holding a certain degree of power over the nursing staff. Is this typical? When I was a secretary, before graduating, my responsibilities were limited to secretarial duties, and I had no power whatsoever, except as was related to being a unit secretary.
