5 Center at Mercy Hospital in Buffalo
I recently had the worst assignment ever and I wouldn't recommend 5 Center to anyone for all the money in the world! The unit is extremely large with the capacity to hold 47-50 patients with 3 separate nursing stations. The unit has the ability to monitor patients requiring telemetry. The manager was not friendly and terrorized her staff. This had to be the most toxic working environment I've ever experienced in a long while. I've heard about unhappy nurses, but this unit took the cake!

Nurse- Patient ratio is 1:8 on average with high acuity. Charting is extremely cumbersome via Sorian computer system. Medication administration is completely computerized via the MAK computer system with all meds individually taken from the ADU or Pysix (for meds) on each individual patient. Nurses compete for the use of the ADU. There are usually 2-3 nursing aids on average that do vital signs and patient care which was very helpful. Medications were administered all throughout the night at the oddest times. Heparin sc injections and iv's being flushed at 1 am was completely insane!

The reporting system from nurse to nurse was lousy and done via written report handoff with no specific place to leave the endorsed written report. Nurses ended up leaving the reports in mysterious places. A few times I didn't find my report and had to learn the patient for myself via interviewing the patients and their family as well as reading the chart. It was horrible.

ER faxed reports and gave a 15 minute window for nurses to call to ask questions. Admissions to the floor arrived at changed of shift and could be as many as 3 or 4 arriving within the hour. Their were usually two charge nurses at night who did orders and called doctors for nurses. That was helpful, but honestly when one nurse gets 3 admissions they could have been more helpful by doing an admission or two. This C.O.W. had to pulled into the room to do the nursing admission history and assessment.

Absolutely a horrific experience with a fast paced environment where nurses didn't know where they were coming or going. Rapid Responses were called so frequently because simple things that nurses should be able to pick up on, they couldn't so by the time things were noticed the patient was already crashing.