Acute Care Hospital Case Study

Why I Took the Assignment I Didn’t Want

Location. Timing. No other opportunity. These are a few of the reasons why I took the assignment I didn’t want. You may be wondering, why I did not want to take this assignment in the first place. I have a simple acronym for my answer. LTACH.

What is an LTACH?

If you are familiar with this term, you probably already understand why I didn’t want the assignment. If you are not, let me clue you in. LTACH stands for long-term acute care hospital, and it’s a truly unique combination of hospital and nursing home. The definition of LTACH according to a white paper from Hospital Medicine is as follows:

“A Long-Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH) is an acute care hospital that specializes in the treatment
First of all, the patients are really sick. I mean really sick. To be admitted to these types of hospitals, patients must still require acute care that you would typically receive at a normal hospital. So a lot of patients admitted are cases of failure to wean from a ventilator, or incredible cases of MRSA with wounds that will not heal, and morbidly obese patients with multiple health problems.

So why was I hesitant to take an assignment at a local LTACH? Besides the fact that I knew I would be dealing with incredibly sick patients, I also knew that at this particular hospital, the nurses were always working short-staffed. Hence, why they choose to meet their staffing needs through my agency. However, this was a 13-week assignment that was only an hour from home, which meant I could receive travel pay and other perks without having to relocate for 13 weeks. So, I went ahead and took the
I became a master at suctioning and working with patients on ventilators – something that I was not well-experienced with and a little frightened of before the assignment.

Did anyone say Code Blue? At this hospital, I sure did. A lot. In fact, it was not uncommon in this 45-bed facility to run a couple of Code Blues per week. As luck would have it, the Code Blues always seem to occur on night shift, during the nights I worked. What luck. I called and participated in more Code Blues during this assignment, than I had in five years working in regular hospitals. Not that this is something I wanted to go through, but looking back on this, being in these codes really helped me learn exactly what to do and how to respond in a code situation... fast!

I also took care of the worst bed sores and wounds I ever dealt with in my entire career! Not that people were getting bed sores at this particular facility at any kind of alarming or unusual rate, but many of the patients were admitted for extensive wound care. I became an expert at packing a wound and working with a lot of different wound care artillery such as silver and other items that are only ordered for the most severe