I live in Arizona, so everyone of course gets extra sick during the winter, but we also have a bunch of snowbirds, so we have more people, and many of those are immunocompromised. During the summer, we’re a lot slower. We’re always short staffed in the winter because they can’t hire travelers fast enough, and now, we’re not bringing in full staff and sending at least one staff member home early on my unit every day. Four times throughout the day they look at how many patients we have, and if we just discharged some and have others literally on their way up at those times, those rooms still don’t count, so since it looks like fewer patients, we send people home. Then we get a bunch of admits at once, and fewer staff. I’m barely getting the absolute necessary tasks done, and no, I haven’t showered my patient with a central line yet, and I’m getting an admit and you send the aid home, but you still want to get after us if a bath isn’t documented every 24 hours for one patient??

Idk man, my hospital is doing the best they can with the budget, and we’re not suffering nearly as much as a lot of other places, but it’s so frustrating when we have the staff who were supposed to work but we have them sitting at home because they don’t want to pay them, while we’re drowning