On Call Advice

• Discuss with seniors early and often and don’t do things that make you feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Everyone is expecting their juniors to ask them things.
• Always assess patients in an ABCDE manner. This gives you structure and means you won’t miss things. It will keep you safe.
• You will have an iPhone with a list of tasks allocated to you or you can view your tasks on the eWhiteboard. The task list will be “prioritised” automatically because tasks are classed as either “Routine”, “High”, “Urgent” or “Immediate”. Anything “Immediate” you should also be bleeped about. This is not necessarily the order that you should do things in – the person creating the task doesn’t know the rest of your list and different nurses have different experience and confidence with clinical assessment of patients. If you have several urgent tasks, or just an overwhelmingly long list, talk to the Hospital Out Of Hours team as they can redistribute the tasks so they get done more quickly. 
• Don’t forget that on-call is about doing urgent things. Don’t try to take responsibility for decisions and jobs that are better done by the regular day team.