I’ve been at this call business for a long time.
Well, strike that because I swore to my big belly patient last week that I would stop saying that. I apparently told them that I had been a nurse for a very long time, not once but twice, and they called me out on it the second time. They just wanted me to be more specific.
Ahem.
I’ve been at this call business for nearly 25 years and in that time I’ve had my share of no shows or no answers or, on two occasions, the tech that I was waiting for was in a car accident.
It was odd enough the first time it happened but the second time? Eerie. Made me think of the night call unit secretary that I worked with in California. She trained me and was always there to answer questions, even after I became a nurse. She died driving home after a night shift.
This is why I always, always, always tell people when I have called them in to drive safe.
What do you, as the call nurse, do in event of a no answer/no show/accident?
If you are me, you grab the big red book of numbers. Everyone is in this book: surgeons, PAs, doctors’ offices, anesthesiologists, CRNAs, scrub techs, circulators, management, charge nurses, SPD, and the all of the department numbers for the hospital.
You know, in case you don’t have those memorized.
If you still haven’t gotten a call back or a response to the second call, you start in on the list.
Over time you will get a feel for who is friendly to a three am phone call and who might be interested. If it is a scrub tech you might even call nurses who you KNOW are capable of scrubbing the case.
That’s what I did when the first tech got into the car accident on the way in.
If you don’t get a response or all you get is no thank yous or hung up on, you call the nursing supervisor to keep trying.
If after the case is picked and there have been no nibbles you should consider more scorched earth options. You call management until THEY pick up. And dump the problem into their lap.
While this is going on you also keep preparing for the case. Because the show must go on.
In my twenty years of doing this I have never had outright nos from every single person I have called. Knock on wood. Mostly because I have garnered 17 years of brownie points at my current hospital.
Because they’ve all been there and can commiserate with you.
A very last resort would be transferring the patient to another hospital. This is the very last option because there are going to be delays getting the receiving hospital to accept the patient. There might not be room in their overnight schedule. And surgeons would definitely not appreciate this kind of maneuver.
And you’ll never hear the end of it.
If you are going to be new to call and are scared that this might happen, start gathering your brownie points now. Be nice, consistently nice, and people will have a harder time saying no to you.
There is also the mandatory call list but that is more to cover people during the day. I’ve never used it at night. But it is an option.
Know your friendlies and also know who is more likely to say yes.
That will save you, the patient, and the surgeon a big headache just trying to get the case off the board.
Being nice never cost you anything.
Think of it as banking brownie points for use in an emergency.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 