[dhammo01]

I'm not a big fan of med-surg nursing....so where did I land a job? ON a med-surg unit haha. BUT, there are several factors that makes the unit I'm on enjoyable and a great experience for me since I too am a new nurse. For one, I work in a Magnet hospital and it's a teaching hospital so it's a great learning enviroment and the max patients I can have is 4. Second, everyone on the unit seems to be very cohesive with each other. Outside of work we will all go hang out and have a good time or call each other up. Everyone on the unit seems to have less than 2 years experience so everyone still appears to be stoked about there job . The only problem I have with the place I work is that the PCTs will sometimes have 10 patients a piece and I don't really like that. I worked as a PCT for 5 years before I got my RN and PCT work can be very back breaking and hard; and it also means your PCTs will seem non-existant because they are busy with 10 patients and probably tired and burned out.

The unit is actually an intermediate care unit but still under med-surg. I noticed that we don't receive the nursing home patients (once in awhile we do), and I know that I still have a lot to learn and am looking forward to learning this new stuff. We deal with transplants, trauma, and some gen surg. It's not the typical med-surg unit that I have experienced from past work and clinical rotations, and I like it haha. But, I think that I want to get more into ICU or ER. I did my preceptorship (or capstone some call it) in the ER, but I"m still undecided which direction to take.

-David

[ChristineN]

Originally Posted by dhammo01

I'm not a big fan of med-surg nursing....so where did I land a job? ON a med-surg unit haha. BUT, there are several factors that makes the unit I'm on enjoyable and a great experience for me since I too am a new nurse. For one, I work in a Magnet hospital and it's a teaching hospital so it's a great learning enviroment and the max patients I can have is 4. Second, everyone on the unit seems to be very cohesive with each other. Outside of work we will all go hang out and have a good time or call each other up. Everyone on the unit seems to have less than 2 years experience so everyone still appears to be stoked about there job . The only problem I have with the place I work is that the PCTs will sometimes have 10 patients a piece and I don't really like that. I worked as a PCT for 5 years before I got my RN and PCT work can be very back breaking and hard; and it also means your PCTs will seem non-existant because they are busy with 10 patients and probably tired and burned out.

The unit is actually an intermediate care unit but still under med-surg. I noticed that we don't receive the nursing home patients (once in awhile we do), and I know that I still have a lot to learn and am looking forward to learning this new stuff. We deal with transplants, trauma, and some gen surg. It's not the typical med-surg unit that I have experienced from past work and clinical rotations, and I like it haha. But, I think that I want to get more into ICU or ER. I did my preceptorship (or capstone some call it) in the ER, but I"m still undecided which direction to take.

-David

Hey David, that sounds like a great floor you're on for getting ICU or ER experience. I have thought about going to the ER in a year or two myself (pediatric ER). You made a good point, employee to employee relations can make or break a unit. The med-surg unit I almost ending up working on had absolutely no teamwork whatsoever. It was every nurse for themselves. Nurses had anywhere from 5-8 pts (on daylight!!!) and it was not uncommon for the PCT to have all 24 beds (and yet still be expected to do all the vitals, blood sugars, accurate I&O, etc). I found their RN as well as PCT pt loads to be, IMO, unsafe. I know it "works" for them, but they also had a very impressive number of pts falling every month. Nurses and PCT's were getting burnt out, but for many of them this was all they knew.