The Monkey

I could go into a long, drawn-out tirade into all of the reasons why I'm so pissed, but I'm going to exercise restraint and limit myself to a rant on only one of the things that pissed me off last night. The subject is patient bed assignments. Excited? I knew you would be.

We know the surgical schedule a full week in advance. Certain types of surgeries must come to my unit, so if someone other than a monkey was in charge of bed assignments, they could plan ahead and reserve beds for the patients who must come to my unit.

Yesterday, one of our patients had surgery in the morning. Around noon-time, he was done in recovery and they wanted to send him up to us. The only problem was that the monkey, as is her habit, had filled us up with non-surgical patients who could have gone anywhere. We had no beds.

The monkey sat on this problem until 3pm, and then called us and said to transfer out one of the patients she had given us earlier, who didn't need to be on our floor. Recovery room called a few minutes later wanting to give report so that they could transfer the patient to us. Recovery was complaining that the patient had been waiting for hours on a hard gurney, like that was our fault. We can't transfer patients out and have the room cleaned on a minutes notice, so they were told to call back later.

This was also change of shift. If the monkey had made a decision earlier, the patient could have been transferred fairly quickly, but at change of shift we have more urgent matters that must be taken care of in that narrow window of time. Transferring patients is not our priority.

Recovery room started calling every five minutes and each time the secretary would explain why we couldn't accept the patient yet. The calls became ugly and so the secretary refused to take any more calls from them. That meant the nurses had to take the calls, which just put us further behind, delaying the transfer.

While we were at each other's throats, the monkey who caused the problem, was driving home, blissfully unaware of the situation she created. I wish that I could say that last night was an aberration, but this was typical monkey scheduling.