Float Nurses in a Hospital

The ones I remember truly "floated" ... except to ER and the Burn Unit.

I worked in in couple of hospitals in the U.S.

When I worked in Labor & Delivery our floats always came from the ante/post partum unit, and was usually a nurse who volunteered. Then the hospital float would fill her spot on ante/post partum (and would get the easiest patients). When I worked in GYN we would get floats from med/surg. The med/surg nurses were very good all round floaters - could handle lots of stuff. On very rare occassions an L&D nurse would be floated to a very short staffed E.R.
When I worked on a urology/transplant unit we would switch floaters between us and med surg.
The regular hospital floaters could end up anywhere (though we would never get one in L&D), then the charge nurse would usually give them the easiest patients, keeping the most complex patients for the more specialized nurses. An L& D nurse would also (very) occasionally float to the newborn intensive care unit. An ante/post partum nurse would float occasionally to the nursery.
Hope this helps.

It depends on the hospital. I've seen medical ward nurses suddenly in the surgical ICU or an administrator suddenly in the operating room. Some administrators think a nurse is a nurse. It can be kind of like telling a pediatrician to suddenly perform an appendectomy. Theoretically yes they should know how to do it, or at some point in their training should have, but if you are rusty it can cause problems. The old days of nursing specialties just like physician specialties provided better care.

I float between our Peds and Post-Partum/Ante-Partum units, and I've occasionally floated to our Intermediate Nursery and NICU. Our hospital has an official "float pool", though, and they usually work all over the place: Med-Surg, Telemetry, Oncology, ICU, Ortho. Some of the float pool nurses will work on Peds and Mother-Baby too.