Float orientation

Friday night I oriented to two  different units so that I would be allowed to float there in the future if needed. For some background, I work on a a busy med-surg telemetry unit. We get some pretty high acuity patients and usually have 5-6 (almost always 6) patients per nurse. The two units I oriented to were the med-surg ortho unit and our hospital's intermediate care (IMC) unit, which is where patients go if they are too sick for a normal med-surg floor, but not sick enough to go to ICU.  The ortho unit was a complete joke for me. Apparently I'm not qualified to care for ortho patients (fine by me!) so they gave me their general med-surg patients. All of my patients were alert and oriented and able to get to the bathroom by themselves.  Seriously? On my unit I'm lucky if ONE of my patients meets all of those criteria. It was such a joke. I don't know why they don't send those types of med-surg patients to our floor. . .I'm sure ortho is difficult and all, but spread the love with the walkie talkies! Having 2 total cares per night is just not my jam. It'd also be nice if the walkie talkies that ED sends us weren't all heroin addicts who require q2 dilaudid. Uggghhhhh. 

Anyway, IMC wasn't terrible. It was actually quite similar to my unit, which is kind of scary to me. The worst part was following around a nurse who treated me like an incompetent student and wouldn't even let me do the most mundane things like boost a patient up in bed with the aid or take vital signs. I've been an independent nurse for a a few months now, and the patients she had weren't any sicker than patient's I've had so it was kind of insulting. 

All in all, not a bad night. It certainly could've been worse.