Published by Sean on 03 May 2008 at 11:07 pm
Pleasant!
I had a pleasant surprise today. Apparently patient census and acuity is extremely low in the ICU tonight. So, because of the large excess of labor recourses (i.e. registered nurses), I was offered the night off. I gladly accepted the offer!
That definitely goes under the list of things that would never happen in med/surg nursing!
Speaking of that list, another thing that would go there is my experience last night. They did a bedside gastroscopy on the patient next to mine. They hooked up a really neat plasma television-on-wheels to the scope so everyone around can see what they’re doing.
I watched the video screen as they carefully pulled six perfectly stacked quarters out of the patients stomach where they had lodged in the pyloric sphincter.
It scored an 8/10 on my newly invented and soon to be patented nursing neat-o-meter!
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Braden on 05 May 2008 at 9:09 am #
Actually Sean, this kind of thing happens in med-surg all the time. I worked for some time as a staffing coordinator at the local hospital back when I was a lowly LPN and couldn’t find any other jobs.
At least at that hospital (and I’ve seen it at subsequent hospitals), there was a list that we would make so that anyone who really didn’t want to be at work that day could call up to 24 hours in advance and request the day off if we were overstaffed. We called it a “hospital convenience day” and the nurse would generally get to go home on the provision that if we suddenly got an influx of patients they needed to come in within 1 hour and finish their shift. I think they got paid 4 dollars an hour for the time they were on call. If we couldn’t find enough nurses to accept this, they we could just let them go for the day but they didn’t get paid.
Not sure about the gastroscopy, though.