I work for a 1000 bed teaching hospital on a vascular access team. There are currently 2 full time nurses and 2 part time flexi nurses on this team with one ultra sound.  I would like to informally benchmark and hear from other institutions regarding your number of staff compared to number of beds and what your basic job description is. For example, we at this time, strictly place picc's and have little care and maintenance involvement. Any info would be much apprecitated. Thanks.
We cover a network of hospitals with the total bed capacity about 900. We have 4 full time employees (including me as the manager, who doesn't insert PICCs full time) and several prns. We have 4 ultrasound machines, 2 at each of the larger sites. We also do very little care and maintenance, due to the high demand for PICCs (and travelling from site to site takes up some of our time).
How many are you inserting per month? We are around 195 per month and growing.
Gwen Irwin
Austin, Texas
We average around 125-150 per month and provide monday throught friday service. I previously worked at a teaching 750 bed teaching hospital in Florida and we did m-f and had 5 members on our team with 4 ultrasounds and averaged around 225-250 per month. Little care and maintenance was done by the team because the demand for picc insertions was so high.
Thanks for you input.
Laura McRae, RN, BSN, CRNI
In a 300 beds teaching Trauma Level 1 Institution, We have one full time PICC RN (10 hours per day Monday - Friday excluding holidays) with a full time nursing assistent who was trained to do all the non nursing work, like invetory, keeping all the forms current, making sure the PICC cart is fully stocked etc. plus she shadows the PICC RN and is present in all insertions, helping with the sterile set up, if there are difficulties during insertion she hands all the different sterile equipment needed, helps if the patient is agitated, then takes down the sterile field at the end of procedure.
The PICC RN also does all teaching to RN staff, follow up on every PICC patient, she is available for management and care of PICC, teaches the new residents who rotate each month about PICC, and is responsible for the entire hospital nursing staff PICC education. We do 3-7 PICC insertions daily. Two additional nurses were trained to function when the Full Time PICC nurse is off, and we make sure that the other 2 RN get at least 3-5 days a month of doing PICC.
The role of the nursing assistent is essential, because of her presence the entire visit at the bedside from begining to end including all the paper work and odering the x-ray takes about 25 minutes, which allows the RN time to do PICC follow up. So when we go to a ward to do PICC insertion we get to see all the other patients on that ward who have a PICC and make sure the ward nurses do their PICC care right.
The PICC RN also does the declotings, which are about 1-2 per month.