glorified med passer

You know more than that nurses who are sitting around while their patients alarms go off, and their basic needs are unmet. You know how to care, and that is more valuable than another degree or 10 more years of experience. They could take care of their patients, they just DON'T CARE to.
You haven't made a mistake. Keep working with all of the integrity of your good heart. Everything will come together for you after a while.

It does get easier...you gotta trust me on this. You are on the right path, keep doing what you are doing. In the beginning, passing meds in LTC is overwheming. and LOOONG. You will be able to breeze along your med pass to do all the other interventions you want to do. Everyone starts off this way...

Hi altered ego,

I know exactly how you feel. I work the 3-11 shift at a ltc facility and from the moment I walk in the door until 1/2 hour before I leave all I do is pass meds. I have not had a lunch break, mental break, or a bathroom break since I started working this shift. I am expected to pass meds, do treatments, charting, and pull orders all before 11pm. My whole 2months training was to help me increase my stamina so that I could pass meds at some record breaking speed. but i like to look in the MARs to make sure Im giving the right meds to my patient and I like to check pulse and b\p before giving some meds. and I like to look at the face/ID of my patient to make sure its the right patient. I guess I'll never get a break

Every new nurse sometimes feels like they made a mistake in choosing nursing. Nursing is a love/hate relationship. I still sometimes wonder what my life would have been like in a different profession. We all do. But at the end of the day, even if all you did was pass meds, your presence there was appreciated by someone. Your patients were glad you were there. Someday soon after you have fine tuned your practice, you will have time to give that little extra and you will know instinctively what to do and when to do it. Just continue to be determined to be the nurse you want to be and don't follow the example of nurses who have time to sit and chat. Maybe they have all thier work done because they are good at it or maybe they just gave up. Either way it has little to do with how you do your job. Commit to nursing excellence and forget about what everyone else is doing. Don't forget to be a team player. Its contagious and nurses don't forget. If you offer to help someone, they will return the favor someday when you need help. It will take time, but you will gain the respect of your fellow nurses, and someday, you will be skating right thru your shift and you'll go home satisfied that you made the right choice.

Definitely you want to help your fellow nurses if possible, but in LTC the key to being successful is having a good relationship with your CNA's. I don't mean let them walk over you--establish from day 1 that you ARE senior to them but don't make their job any harder than it already is if you can help it. It only takes a minute to protect the freshly made bed with a chux when you flush or give GTube meds, to give a full glass of water if the patient says they are thirsty, to at least throw a towel over a spill to start the clean up and then let the CNA know abut it. If you're not in the middle of med pass, answer a light and put someone on the BSC or bedpan and let the CNA know. Believe me, they will appreciate it and will then go out of their way to help you. I had other nurses ask me all the time Why the CNA's would do for me and not them -- Well, al I can say is what goes around comes around!