Swear to Care

Good to see you are starting to read my Blog. OK, here is what else is going on in the World of On-Call Night Nursing in Arizona.

Lets get the basics down so we all are on the same page. Unless you are from Mars you’re aware the day here on earth is 24 hours long. In the world of nursing there has to be someone to Give Care to hospice patients the entire 24 hours of a day. So who would that be? You got it…nurses.

OK, I got that basic information out of the way. So the next step…to cover this span of a day there are nurses who work during the daytime and there are nurses who work during the night.

As you will agree, this “Care Giver” business is pretty important, especially if it is you who we are giving care to.

As is probably normal in other 24 hour businesses there is a Day crew and a Night crew, The day crew pretty much comes in during the day light hours and the night crew comes in once it gets dark. Now that we have all of this elementary crap out of the way lets get down to it. Here is what is going on with Arizona nursing.

The issue goes back to that 24 hour thing. If you divide the day in half it comes down to 12 hours for day shift and 12 for night. Now, throw in the fact that the day nurses are not able to get what they have to get done during their shift, which leaves that having to be done by the night crew. Now you get an imbalance in who does what during the two halves of the day. Compound it with who gets paid for the time spent working and who does not, you now are seeing the problem developing.

To set the record straight, I totally respect what the day nurses have to do. Daytime is when there is more happens to get in the way of doing our job. Naturally there are things that are not going to get done that need to get done when other things pull you away from your duties. There are reasons why the day nurses do not get their job finished. They are good reasons too.

So after the day nurses finish their shift the night nurses come in to pick up what the day nurses could not get done plus Give Care all night.

Yes, the day nurses do work pass their scheduled tour of duty to get some of that overflow work done. Plus, the day nurses get paid for that extra time…But there is usually more than they can get done which gets moved…where? Yes, to the night nurses.

Unfortunately, the night nurses have to have all of their duties done and the leftover duties from the day crew before the day nurses come in the next day…so, that leads to the night nurses to have to come in early or stay beyond their shift to get their work, and the day crews work, done. Do the night nurses get paid for that extra time…do you think I would be blogging about all this if they did?

You may say…”Hey, why don’t you quit whining and get another job or become a Day Nurse?”. Well, the answer to this questions goes back to my previous blog. We love what we do and when we do it. The problem is…WE WANT to get paid for the hours we work.

Plus, the questions I have for you is…Why is it only Arizona that does not value the nursing profession enough to pay them for the work they do?

I’ll be back with more reports on the Hospice Nursing in Arizona and, YES, more questions.