Job shortage ? When my ED avg wait time is 6hours …

[GassYous]

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Yeah, when I rotated in the ED a couple of months ago, wait times were like 12 hours but we each saw like 3 patients in an 8 hour shift, many of them in the hallway. Hospital capacity and boarded up rooms were 100% the issue, not lack of MDs.

We actually didn’t have an issue with nursing shortage, but for those places that do why don’t MDs just draw their own blood and vitals at this point? I saw some residents literally clean rooms to get patients seen faster

Because they see you do it, it will defacto become your job when you have enough doctor things to do

 

[CajunMedic]

We actually didn’t have an issue with nursing shortage, but for those places that do why don’t MDs just draw their own blood and vitals at this point? I saw some residents literally clean rooms to get patients seen faster

That's part of my frustration as a resident now. Pre-Covid was "Don't get caught up doing nursing tasks like starting IV's and putting them on the monitor so you can see more patients", now it's "You're going to have to start your own IV's, draw your own blood, etc. Oh, and you're a senior now, you should be seeing more patients"

So now, I have to talk to the nurse to find whatever closet I can see the patient in, hunt them down in the waiting room, pull them back myself, start their IV if it hasn't been done already, do my doctor stuff, put them back in the waiting room, dodge the nurse administrator who is wearing a white coat for whatever reason to take vital signs and hand out snacks, pull them again for the consultant/hospitalist to see, beg for the patient to be moved to a treatment recliner for whatever they may need (So far there's been Cardizem, Heparin, K/Mg, and any ABX imaginable). Only reason I had a patient get a bed one shift was they had bilateral PE's. My new career highlight: Waiting room to LVAD center transfer without getting a physical ED bed. Better was hearing the charge nurse tell administration that while begging for inpatient beds, more nurses, or to go on internal disaster. It's bad when the triage nurse is in the fishbowl, who has been watching every physician run laps through through the waiting room say "I really don't know how y'all are managing to do this, I thought it was tough on us"

I've helped clean a room when it came down to having a bed vs. working a priority trauma in the hallway on the EMS cot.

Phew, I needed to rant for a second. To quote Clark Griswold in "Christmas Vacation": "Holy $*it, Hallelujah, Where's the Tylenol"

 

[GonnaBeADoc2222]

My job has made it clear that they don't value (or actually, won't reward) my productivity. We are 100% salary based. I learned to "re-adjust" my productivity when I saw old-timers making 100k more than me, sitting around seeing half the patients I did.

So, you won't see me doing any of the nursing tasks above. I'll be straight chillin till the patient is in a room, thx.