Asklemmy

For leisure I use two monitors for creative endeavors like art and writing. I'll keep the working piece on one monitor and the tools, references, color palettes, timeline, history or science influences, or whatever else have you on the other. At work the secretary has two monitors to view the electronic charting system on one screen and whatever other resources they need on the other (IT and repair tickets, the intranet, incident reports, the staffing schedule, etc).

I also often steal the two monitor setup when they're at lunch to prep the morning assignments because to properly balance an assignment I have to consider lots of different pieces of information that are in a lot of different places for a little under 20 individual patients and 4-8 nurses and nursing assistants (them dayshift staffing numbers turn me green):

• Whether any patients are being discharged (more work) - this could be anywhere from the unit summary board to the individual summary to me having to dig through the social worker notes. Sometimes they send an internal email with all the upcoming discharges so I have to open my work email.

• Which patients have a sitter (often more behaviorally acute and the sitter has to be let up for lunch and other breaks. This is usually on the unit summary board assuming the assigned nurse checked the correct box in the flowsheets of the individual chart. This is also copied over from the previous assignment sheet but I have to make sure I remove any that the doctor discontinued and add any that were initiated.

• Which nurse coming on shift did the least recent admission (if it's their turn and I can't split the patients evenly I'll give them less). This is in a physical admission and discharge register book in a drawer at the secretary's desk.

• Who's next shift's charge. Ideally I want to give them less severe patients because they will have extra tasks (like this one). This is on the unit schedule which we can access through an online scheduling system.

• Who is coming back from yesterday and which patients they had so I can give most or all of them back. Report will go faster and they will care for the patient more efficiently if they already know them. This is on the previous assignment sheet, but if the patient was admitted during that shift, they won't be on the assignment sheet that was made just before that shift started. So I have to go into the notes and see which nurse wrote their admission note.

• Any patient or staff specific conflicts or special situations. This is things like patients that are sex-selectively sexually inappropriate or aggressive (they will behave better if assigned a staff member not of their preferred or targeted gender) or a patient who is super prejudiced and I know they are likely to be abusive to certain coworkers, or a coworker who has had a particularity complicated case for two days in a row and if they get that patient again for day three they'll snap. Sometimes these are in the digital handoff but more often they're passed on in handwritten reports that are shredded immediately after use or passed on verbally to begin with.

So I'm consulting at least four different computer programs and between two and three paper records just to do this one task that I do every shift, and the medical record program does NOT like to share screen real estate.