Nothing to do but keep busy.

I am back out of a busy time at my place of business. We have gone from 8 patients with treatments through the night, 3 bipaps and 1 ventilator running back to just having one Q6 during the night now, actually only 4 patient with breathing treatments in the whole hospital, wow what a change huh.

This got me wondering what do people do at their hospital when they have nothing to do? What are some things to keep you mind from total boredom?

This list below are some of the things that I know of from different places I have worked at, some current and some not so current. In my current job I am the only night person on in my department at a time so we have to find things to do, if there was 2 of us here we could take turns being on call, but as you see that isn't possible.

Things to do when you patient load is down:

• Catch up on some reading, personal or work related. A library card is nice to have for this.
• If you have internet access take a online college class. Great time to do homework
• Bring in your laptop and rent some movies or T.V. series. I now have seen all 3 seasons of Lost, which I now am hooked on, all of Entourage which I fully recommend, and in the 3rd Season of Soprano's. I have been watching these at home also on days off. We had a lot of downtime this summer. This is a good reason to use Netflix.
• Learn to program different languages on your laptop.
• Learn to speak a different language.
• Enter Photoshop contest's on Worth1000.com.
• Play games on the laptop.
• Work on your skills with paper football.
• Blog
• Write articles or edit articles on Wikipedia.
• Terrorize the nurses by going into a empty and pushing the call light and hide.
• Explore the hospital. I have noticed in the different hospitals I have worked at that there are some interesting areas and to find. Little nooks and crannies.
• If you hospital has a Physical Therapy gym you can use, life some weights or get on a the treadmill or bike.
• Play hackey sack.
• Do some checkbook balancing and pay some bills.
• Play online poker, never done this at work but would be nice if it wasn't blocked.
  Old school ETT tubes used to come in a Long hard plastic tube. Well in the military we figured out how to make a blow dart gun out of it and I.V. needles. Then we would use a dartboard and have contests. Lots of fun.
• Tackle you colleague, wrap him up in ace bandages and Kerlex like a mummy, carry him up the elevator to a medical floor, toss him out and yell help. Umm I might of seen that happen one time.
• One Military hospital I worked at we would bring in a Playstation and have Madden Football tournaments.
• Hook up a ekg training module to a beside monitor in the ICU of a patient who has a brand new nurse and have it run different rythm's on the monitor and watch the new nurse freak out. Sorry nope never seen that happen.
• Actually learn something new, or refresh something you know about your job.
• Work on something you can improve in your department.
• Find a place, take a catnap.
• Go out to the floors and socialize with the nurses and tech's. This is a good thing to do because they get board also and it makes a stronger relationship between RT and RN's and other support staff like Xray and Lab. I recommend doing this once a shift. Funny thing I actually had a night where I was just tired and didn't feel much like talking with people and a Nurse from the ICU paged me just to see if I was ok and what I was doing. Kind of nice.

That's about all I can think of right now but would like to hear any other RT's ideas of what they do when there is nothing to do.

When you bored you can either make the time productive or just have fun with it and relax, I guess it's up to you and how you department its.

Take care.