Let me begin by giving some background about my situation. I graduated from a nursing school with an ADN in May 2012 from a school in California. Academically I was # 2 in a class of about 60 students. I looked for a new grad RN position in CA; but, no one would hire me. I would like get some feedback on this myth that hospitals spend thousands of dollars in order to train a new Grad RN (here I am not talking about Versant residency or any training into special units like ICU, NICU etc).
I was hired by and I am currently working in a medical school affiliated hospital with a level 1 trauma center in the state of Texas. The unit that I am currently working in is the Cardiac Step down unit. It's one level below Cardiac ICU and one level above regular Med-Surge floor.
My current wage level is in the mid 20s with differential for nights, weekend, and afternoon. I have received a total of 6 weeks of training. I was signed off on almost all my skills during the first week of hire (Vent, Trach care, Med pass, Blood draws, IV start, Foley, NG etc, etc). During the last 5 weeks of my training my preceptor has been mostly reviewing my charting and helping other Nurses. Here are the hard numbers. I have received total wages of less than $6,000.00 for the 6 weeks of training (this also includes house orientation and computer training (lasted only 6 hours). I don't know how much my preceptor has earned in those 6 weeks; but, I can assume it wasn't more than 9k (70,000/52weeks X 6weeks). I have handled the same pt load as an experienced nurse after my first week on the unit. While most of the time my preceptor has been helping out other nurses on the unit.
I am not including the wages for the instructors for house orientation because there were more than 30 individuals including nurses, techs, dietary, HUC (secretary of the units), maintenance etc, etc. Moreover, since the hospital is in the process of going to computer charting, there were about 35 nurses including new hires and veteran nurses that were present during the computer training.
So the way I look at it, this hospital has spent about a maximum of 10K (wages that my preceptor received during the training) training me. If I wasn't there, the same number of pts would still be cared by an RN. The only difference is those pt were cared by a rookie RN rather than a veteran RN. Also again my preceptor was usually helping out other nurses during this training. It wasn't like she was hovering over me while I was providing care to the patients. Since very few hospitals will hire a new grad, for providing me 10K worth of training for 6 weeks, I will be working for this hospital for at least a year and the hospital will be saving about 20-30K in wages paying me instead of a veteran RN. So for this scenario in the end, the hospital comes out making a profit of at least 10k-20K. Furthermore, I will be replacing an expensive nurse from resource department along with decreasing the overtime wages for the whole unit. So that just goes to increase the profit margin for the hospital.
Finally, I have purchased malpractice insurance independently and the hospital also provides for malpractice insurance for nurses. So again I would like to know where is this myth of hospitals spending thousands of dollars to train a new grad coming from. What am I missing here????