Who is?
This is the story of a new nurse navigating the road to success and competency on the floor of a cardiology unit at a large metro hospital. It is about successes, failures and the realization that this is for real. I moved cross-country, out of the warmth of SW to the rain-soaked paradise of the Great Northwest, back home, back to my roots. I packed up my wife, 2 crazy cats and all of our worldly belongings into a 16 foot UHaul, all to start anew. This is my story. And I’m sticking to it.
I am a real person, I promise!
Just looking for a contact email to see if you’d be ok with our magazine publishing an excerpt if one of your posts.
Just wondering…
I used to work on a cardiovascular step down floor on night shift for 5 years. I’ve recently switched over to the cardiovascular operating room… something about the adrenalin of hearts has me addicted. Anyhow, the step down floor’s patient population was pre- and post-op CABGs, valves, Maze, THEGs, VATs, thoracotomies, vascular disasters (i.e. fem-pops that turn into BKA’s), AAA’s, etc…. My question for you is our nursing ratio for these patients are 9-8 nurses (on a good day) on days and 5 nurses at night for a 28 bed unit; hence, there is a 3-4 patient to nurse ratio on days and except for the charge nurse on nights who has 4 patients herself, the remaining 4 nurses on nights have 6 patients a piece. With all the Insulin drips (which we have to do glucose checks on every hour), telemetry monitoring, dopamine drips, dobutamine drips, starting cardizem drips, maintaining nitroglycerin drips, etc…. I was wondering if the ratio is the same at your facility. It just seems as if the patients are getting older, sicker, and fatter by the minute. I feel like the floor that I left had such a high acuity for a “step-down” unit. There were a lot of times where it felt completely unsafe and all management could say was, “well, it’s not in our budget.” I hope there are other people out there that find this appalling. I hope there are floors out there that are better staffed than the one I left. At times I felt like I was in an Intermediate Care Unit. One reason why I went to the OR instead of the CVICU was I already felt like I was in an ICU except I didn’t have a vent.