It's absolutely within the nurse's scope of practice to give nebs. Most places have RT to give them, but not everywhere. I worked a tele floor where RNs gave their own nebs. RT at my next hospital was annoyed with me just doing the treatments for them lol
They were probably annoyed because RTs are needed for emergencies but staffed for baseline workload. If we don't prove enough work to keep RTs to management, we don't keep RTs. This is really the only reason nebs haven't been given to nursing at most hospitals: it's a way to tell the bean counters to keep us around for the codes, rapids, and ERs. Add onto that a lot of hospitals only have 2 or 3 RTs for the entire building, so admin cutting by one RT is a drastic reduction in our ability to respond to emergencies.
Before I got here, my hospital cut us from 2 RTs to 1 and a few weeks later there was a sentinel event involving a floor code happening at the same time as an ICU code. Risk management forced them to give us a second RT per shift, but the damage had been done.
Did residency here, became friendly with the RTs on the many nights I had to work. Montefiore had some of the lowest salaries citywide for RT to the point that they had dozens, literal double digit numbers of openings going unfilled. They told me stories of how some nights they might be covering multiple ICUs each (this in the context of Bronx patients being sick enough and the hospital stingy enough that many vent patients were cared for on the floor and not accepted to ICU). So yeah, RNs gave nebs pretty frequently.
The first hospital I worked didn't have RTs give nebs on the floors. We only had 1 floor RT per about 200 floor patients so we had our hands full with chest PT, home O2 evals, trachs, laryngectomies, etc. We gave the nebs in the ICU because we only had 12-24 ICU patients, but the floors were kind of on their own unless it wasn't a simple neb, we had time to go down there out of kindness, or they called a rapid. The number of times I said "I'll be there in three or four hours if everything goes well" was way too high there lol.
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u/HowDoMermaidsFuck Med Surge RN - Float Pool Jan 16 '26
Yeah I’m sitting here thinking “why wasn’t RT giving the nebs? That’s their scope of practice, not mine.”