HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Well, Happy 2009 everyone! We brought in the new year in the same old fashion, watching Dick Clark and Times Square. Pretty sad to see him get old though. He looks and speaks pretty darn well for a stroke victim.
So, I worked 5 days (12 hour days) last week and had one day off and worked 3 days already this week. The company I am working for is doing away with their double time for overtime so, I had to get as many hours in there as I could. Smart business move, they have filled most of their nursing positions with the new grads and they are all willing to pick up overtime since they are fresh out of school and money from being in school.No one is really happy about losing the double ovetime but, we can understand. Of course there are the people who just live to complain, I try to stay as far away from them as possible. Some people would complain if you gave them the world.Sad.
What can I say about work this last week. Wasn't too bad, but the new nurses, I think they are so overwhelmed. They don't seem to even know which questions to ask or when. Our unit is post open heart/thoracic surgery. The daily tasks for each patient is a huge laundry list. You have to monitor their weight, vitals, electrolytes,their exercise, their fluid balance, their rhythm,their blood sugars,plus all their tubes and lines. It's really difficult when you have more than one cabg patient.I started out in Medsurg, back then units weren't so specialized, it was med surg or step down or icu. I think it really helped me get my organizational skills together.75% of nursing is organizing your work, the other 25% is common sense.
Case in point: I had a new nurse ask me at about 8:30 in the morning if I thought she should change an IV on a patient that was 7 days old, this was a post open heart patient. I said definitely. I heard her later ask another nurse the same question she agreed with me and said yes as well. At 5:30 pm she again asked me if I thought the iv really needed to be changed, I said I really do, do you want me to change it. She said no, I want to try, but he had a really bad experience and doesn't want it done. I explained to her she has to be comfortable and make him comfortable, if she wanted, she could have someone else do it. She ended up asking the charge nurse to do it, and it got done at 6:30. I just don't get it. The longer that IV stays in the bigger the risk of infection, we have to be able to tell patients what we know is best for them and just get it done, not sit around and wait all day to build up the anxiety of the nurse or the patient. But, how do you teach that?
Can you guess what my picture is of?
Non noc nocere.