You use your same nursing skills but it's much less stressful and in a more relaxed environment. I will remain in this field until I retire in 3+ years. Very enjoyable and you can spend quality time with your patient's rather than running around in the hospital. You may work two patients per day ( 4 hrs each), or work a 12 hr shift if needed. It's refreshing after working under the stress of a hospital. Good luck !!!
You should enjoy driving. Main thing is your own time management and lot of charting but it’s more relaxing than hospital. Flexibility is much better in home health . Have been doing for 3o yrs and love it.
Organize organize organize! Otherwise you will be charting on your off hours. Try to allow time to do your charting at each home. It's much more laid back than the hospital. You will probably feel like it's a piece of cake.
Depends on your case load, lots of driving and paperwork, you are on your own so its nice and less stressful, also flexible.
With your acute care experience, you should be a valuable asset to the Homehealth community. Homehealth is geared to prevent illness and frequent hospital readmissions. As an RN You will be required to perform start of care, over see LPN and CNA’s, resumption of care and discharges. You will perform medication reconciliation, wound care, medication set up, PICC line care, and lab draws. The pros of HH is are autonomy, able to set your own schedule, life/work balance, limited holidays and able to take a decent lunch break. The cons are some homes are not cleanliness, some homes are in less desired areas, and excessive mileage on your automobile.
It will be at a much slower pace. There is a lot more relationship building, meeting families, dealing with safety issues in the home. I kept Febreeze in my car, some people smoke in their home, they have pets, and I didn’t want to go my next appt smelling. Blessings on your new adventure.
Know that in acute care you have more to work with. Example heavy lifting in a home health scenario sometimes you are by your self, knowing how to be safe not only for your client but most importantly your self. When injured please take all steps to have documentation and if you start getting sore look into it don’t wait to go to have it checked out. Also remember you are there for everything morning care meds meals bathing dressing oral care bowel program and going to any medical appointments. You are the sole caregiver for your shift communication is key.
It takes time to adjust to how the scheduling works and that nursing is really the one (vs doctor) that recommends frequency of visits. Need to have good boundaries and not take calls after hours but rather guide patients to utilize on-call nurse. Home Care companies can pay per visit or per hour. I’d prefer to get paid per hour but I’ve never worked at a pay per visit company. As you can imagine, if you get a really high acuity patient, it will take longer than the average visit; this is especially true for admits. An admit takes a long time to document and I appreciated when my company had a specific admission nurse who admitted the majority of patients. You will probably learn a lot about wound care; from my experience, the nurses drove the specific orders for wound care and it took me awhile to be confident in what I requested for orders. I appreciated consulting the wound care specialists that we had on staff when I had questions. You will get used to calling 911. I always checked my vitals first when when I did an admit just in case i needed to send them back/to ER.
The enjoyment of being able to provide one on one care without interruptions , and providing better teaching on disease process.
