Who starts IV's at night at your workplace?

[NoblePath]

The hospital I work at requires that iv therapy start iv's from about 7:30a-10:30pm. After that you have to call the nursing supervisor who finds a nurse from somewhere else like ICU, etc. The average floor nurse doesn't start IV's. I wonder what other places do about this? I had to throw out some plasma on a patient who was a hard stick because it took over an hour to get a new iv site. One night it took 3 hours to get an iv started because so many nurses called in on halloween night! I think it is ridiculous that they don't have just one iv therapy nurse overnight and I'm sure they could find things for them to do in between that'd be productive.

[NoblePath]

Well I've since found out that a floor nurse has to accompany IV therapy and successfully complete 10 iv's before you can start them on your own. Also I work on an oncology floor and our pt's usually have ports or piccs but the patients that come up that are not oncology are sickle cell or iv drug users so these are people that are frequent flyers and are notorious hard sticks (we get the same sickle cell pt's over and over). It's not uncommon for these people to have an iv in the foot or a finger. So I guess the thinking is that they don't want us to attempt an iv on someone who is a notorious hard stick if you rarely ever start them. They also did some patient satisfaction survey and found that patients especially remember when their iv was started and it's an indicator or high or low satisfaction so they want as little of attempts as possible. It's still frustrating though.