Nurses, generally, aren't really like the kind of "nurses" you find in the more...specialist section of your newsagent.
They are vastly overworked, underpaid and hugely stressed, as detailed by this fine upstanding lady who I would not want to piss off.
One day I was the only registered nurse for 18 patients for all of my shift from 0730 until 2130 hours. At 2100 my relief comes in. She has been off duty for a week and does not know the patients. She is a newish pool nurse. I need to give her a detailed report on each and every patient. She will be in charge of their care on night shift. Even if I only spend 2 minutes per patient during the report session, handover will still take 36 minutes. But two minutes per patient will not even scratch the surface in telling her everything she needs to know and handover to the day staff so they know. Three of the patients are acutely ill right now and have some really complex things going on. Most of them have relevant past medical histories that would take longer than 2 minutes to handover.
I had an admission at 2100 so I start handing over at 2115. The oncoming nurse cannot touch a patient until she gets report and knows about them. Doing that is begging for litigation. We really need to get started with this handover.
More here: http://militantmedicalnurse.blogspot.com/
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