LetMeGrabSomeGloves

Common sense ain't so common...

Hey ZDogg! HUGE fan! Cardiac PCU RN here in my first year of practice. I work for a semi-teaching hospital. We get nursing students, but no residents unless an attending decides to independently take one on. This leaves us with an attending based model. We are getting residents in July, and I'm excited about this, but many of the older nurses I work with aren't optimistic.

I work night shift so it's rare that I see the attendings. I have no problem calling a doctor for a pressing need, but many times there are little things that don't warrant a phone call, but do warrant mentioning. I always pass these along to the day RN, but many times our docs don't even check in with them and sometimes it can be days before things are addressed. I find this totally unacceptable and realize it needs to change. Our administration is trying to make it mandatory that attendings find the nurses caring for their patients, but they're getting a lot of pushback both from the docs themselves and from the older nurses who think it's a time suck on an already stressful day. We do utilize Doc Halo (essentially a texting service that is HIPAA compliant) but many docs refuse to use it. I'm to the point where I've only been practicing for 8 months and I'm already disgusted. I feel that we provide our patients good care, but that we owe it to them to provide GREAT care. Any ideas? How do you implement changes in Healthcare 3.0 without getting tons of pushback?