So. Remember last time I posted I talked about being charge nurse two days in a row? And how I was nervous and was hoping for good days? Well, they were decent days. Not crazy busy, had enough staff, nothing too weird going on. Which was good. I even had a nurse tell me I was a good charge nurse, which made me feel good. I'm charge again this Friday, so we'll see how it goes. We're going to be staffed pretty fluffy as my hospital is under investigation by the state right now. See, there were several deaths on our medical/surgical floor in a short period of time (we call these "sentinel events"). And people weren't happy about that. So we were under investigation and it was found we were lacking the proper equipment to monitor patients (which nurses had been pointing out and complaining about for years). Not to mention that we're perpetually short staffed. So, to appease the state, the hospital purchased the appropriate equipment and increased our workload without increasing staff. Excuse me, what?? Nurses have been over worked and understaffed for YEARS and you want to increase our workload with more stupid menial tasks that don't improve patient safety? Without extra staff? Sounds like a great plan. Good job.
Spoiler alert: It wasn't a good plan.
State came back to see how the hospital was doing in preventing these sentinel events and discovered that we were understaffed (gasp!). So now we're in jeopardy of being shut down unless the hospital remedies this problem. So now we're staffed super fluffy. I was off for 4 days and I came back to this: more staff than we need, not sending people home when we can, calling in our on call person even though we don't need them because now the hospital wants to staff appropriately. And here's the dumb thing: I work in a highly specialized area - the birth center. Nurses who work med/surg, ICU, oncology, dialysis, etc want NOTHING to do with the birth center. NO ONE wants ANYTHING to do with the birth center (or NICU). But, if the hospital doesn't think we have enough staff, they're sending us nurses from these other units to "help". It's not helpful. They can get vital signs on the moms, and, well, that's about it. They don't know how to take care of babies. They don't know how to labor and deliver a patient. They don't know. The other night we had an ICU nurse sitting at our front desk and opening the door for visitors (we're a locked unit). Seriously??? This is a good use of resources??
Managers are now expected to take 36 hours of call every 2 weeks (in addition to working their 40 hour work week), to help on the floor if it's needed. Our labor and delivery manager was sent to the ED on Sunday to "help" (about all she could do was fetch water for patients). This is just stupid and is NOT the answer. If you let us hire and train staff to work our unit, and then let us schedule them to actually work on the unit instead of limiting us severely like you have been doing, that would be helpful.
I understand that running a hospital is a business. There's a bottom line. But these issues could have been prevented years ago with appropriate staffing. Nurses all over the country complain about unsafe staffing ratios. We've been complaining for years and years. But it takes people dying before anything is done about it. Which is truly sad. The people running the hospitals don't work on the floor. They don't know how it is. They don't get it. They're more concerned about lining their pockets than the welfare of the patients. This is not how it should be. The hospital touts that patient safety is a priority but they don't actually make it a priority until they're under investigation and under threat of being shut down.
Wow. I'll get off my soap box now. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
