Bad word problems make me all grumpy

Things were hopping at work yesterday. If a patient wasn't leaving the unit for a procedure, they were doing a procedure at bedside. I was stuck as the lunch/ break nurse. Thank goodness we didn't have any codes or RRT calls though, only a couple admissions and transfers. I was running almost all day which makes a 12 hour shift go hella-fast. It was nice considering it has been so slow lately.

However, one of the dreaded responsibilities of the lunch/break nurse is to do patient care assignments for the next shift. That means I have to look at the staffing sheet to determine who is coming and who is supposed to be the lunch/break nurse for the next shift. We also then have to factor in who is regular staff, per diem, traveler (contract nurse only working for us for a few weeks) and preceptee (a new hire to the unit that needs training and assigned to a regular staffer, who hopefully has an interesting assignment to promote learning). Other factors to consider is how sick are the patients, are they on isolation, on a ventilator and how close the patients' rooms are to each other so that the nurses can better see their patients. Additionally, unless you have had special training, certain types of patients, like our stroke patients or ones that came in for stent placement, can't be assigned to you. Plus, if you have staff that are coming in that worked the day before, they typically like to have their same patients back. Sound hard? It kind of is, but it gets worse. You then have to factor in the attitudes of people when they show up and complain about their assignments. Sounds like one of those math word problems from hell that we had to solve in Algebra class.

Well, I tried to factor in all those things when I did the assignments and I still had problems. It didn't help that we had a very sick patient that was on their way to us that had to go to a specially trained nurse that ended up dying around 7:20pm before making it to our unit (Shift change occurs between 7-7:30pm). That added to even more assignment shuffling. Lots of gripes. I think even one person in particular was mad at me when I left even after I had made multiple changes to the assignments based on the comments that started flying at 7pm. So, I left feeling a lot of angst.

I understand why most of our senior staff dislike the lunch/break position. I also understand even more how nice it must be when I show up and take any assignment they throw at me without complaining, even if it is lunch/break nurse. I am pretty sure I have grumbled about assignments in the past, but I take them anyway. I'll try next time to not even grumble.