A day or two ago I was working nightshift housekeeping in the hospital like I normally do and I noticed 2 rooms were empty and looking dirty but they weren't on the board. Not on hold, not marked dirty in the system. Weird. I made a mental note to come back and look at them but other rooms came up keeping me busy.
5am rolls around and the split second its 5 they put up one of the rooms I'd noticed earlier. I get to it and it's completely untouched from earlier when I saw it. I check the whiteboard with pt information, lo and behold the last round done on this room was at 10:45am. Depending on when the patient was actually discharged after the last round this room has possibly been sitting dirty for 14 or more hours.
I finish the room and my pager goes off again right at 6am on the dot. It's the second room I'd seen earlier. This one even had “pt out” written on the 11am spot when I checked the whiteboard. So they were discharged at 11am, and somehow the room wasn't put up to be cleaned until 5am the next day? And they drop both the rooms at the top of the hour, 1 hour apart exactly? Something just doesn't add up here.
I can find no explanation for this, it seems like these rooms have just been left in limbo for 2.5 shift changes so the nurses won't have as many patients. I have no personal issue with that, I know as well as anyone else working in a hospital right now that the nurse to patient ratio is 8:1 in some circumstances and that's terrible. That being said, these rooms are timed. People downstairs are waiting on these rooms. So when they save up multiple rooms at once and drop them at the end of their shift, it keeps me from getting to other discharges and makes the room times longer, making our whole department have bad cleaning times in the system. It clogs things up for multiple departments in the hospital.
I tried to point this out to my supervisor this morning, I even wrote on a sticky note attached to my paper that I'm concerned about this room holding hurting our times.
Not only did I get no response to these concerns, but some nosey supervisor/lead woman decided it was a good time to redirect the attention to the fact that I borrowed an empty unclaimed locker in the computer lab and ate 1 cup of cereal from the staff lounge a week or so ago.
TL;DR So, we don't care about people causing 2-3 shifts worth of backup and overlapping work, but we're gonna micromanage people about their breaktime habits and free cereal?? Fuck this place.