I don't go out much so it's not like I mind actually having a job where I am required to work weekends. I just hate working weekends in a place that completely falls apart because it's the mother fucking weekend. The nurses and docs are there, running their asses off, the patients are there, getting completely pissed off but where is all the support staff? At home, hungover.
No Pharmacy.
No housekeeping.
No supplies.
No clerical staff.
If there is anyone in path lab they are run off their feet to the point where they are invisible.
There is very little in the way of nurses and doctors but that is completely normal.
Sunday was not a good day.
First of all we started the shift out of everything. There was no linen to change the beds. Common drugs were missing. We ran out of gloves and gowns and we had multiple people requiring either barrier nursing or reverse barrier nursing. Spent the first two hours of my shift running around the hospital with a trolly trying to
We have 5 isolation rooms. Three had c-diff. One has MRSA. The other room had a patient who was neutropenic. These rooms are all in a row and the areas between these rooms were completely devoid of gloves, gowns, handwashing stations that actually had soap and anything else we actually required.
We had one working dinamap. One. And one manual cuff for 30 people including the folks on isolation. Does anyone see a problem here?
The junior doctor was on her knees. She was covering all the wards. It took about 8 hours for her to get to my ward and see patients, attend to jobs. I wasn't going to bother with the bleeping unless it was a pre-crash because that just slows the doc down anyway. She new she had to come and I knew she would get there when she could. IV fluid bags ran dry and stayed that way for about 10 hours until more were prescribed. I grab a little tiny bag of saline and put it up at KVO just to keep the cannula's patent but really I shouldn't do that.
My other two staff members were young teenage girls first week on the job. Not a clue. Not a clue.
All three of them were off duty at 8. I was there until 9:00 when nights started, alone. I found patients who had been sat in their chair for 8 hours, pee all over the floor, tablets on the floor. The fluid balance charts were empty. One elderly lady had poured a cup of hot tea over her head.
The state of my ward shocked me.
And nights only had 2 staff.
The icing on the cake was when the site manager showed up and wanted me to thank him for giving me the two little girls and the bank nurse to help out.
Oh yeah thanks. I am going to put that on my incident form about all this and on my letter to the chief executive while I clearly explain that dumbing down and not paying enough staff to be around actually increases costs because of poor patient outcomes.
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