Is your facility warning staff for overtime, for missing lunch breaks or other?

she should have been able to win that one, you are "at work" while on their property...for this purose....not the prof liab issue

Your situation sounds like many other nursing homes, do 1 or 2 things either buddy up with another nurse ( a friend) that can help you with some of your extra work on the floor, or leave. It is not the only place to work

In our unit it's common for breaks to be short, interrupted, or missed altogether. The only ones who get paid for missed breaks are the code team... two RNs and an RT. The rest of us may end up missing our breaks because of a code, but that doesn't count. We also put in a lot of extra time at the end of the shift because our reports are given face-to-face at the bedside on patients with multi-system problems, each of which must be given due attention. Although we usually have only one patient, when the oncoming nurse arrives at the bedside at 7:05 and report takes 20 or more minutes to complete to hospital standards, no accommodation is made for the fact that the clock stops at 7:15. When you have two patients, and are giving report to two different nurses, it could be 7:45 by the time you're done. And that doesn't even consider the late/early admission, the critically unstable patient who needs two nurses for a period of time and there's no extra staff coming on, the change-of-shift code (and they happen often enough!)... and on and on. When you fill out an OT slip, it might be weeks before it comes back to you "not approved" with a note attached... you didn't tell the manager/charge nurse in advance that you weren't going to get your break/your patient was going to destabilize/your relief was going to be late/you had two hours of charting from an event in the last hours of the shift... whatever. We are continually getting emails from management reminding us that breaks have to be completed by a defined time and that we're responsible for making sure we get them when we're supposed to. Nothing is ever said to the ones who are habitually late going for or coming back from theirs which makes me late for mine, or the fact that we can't be compelled to take our breaks in the first or last hours of the shift. I often find myself sitting in the break room when the next shift starts rolling in because it was the only way I was going to get a break at all. Makes me so mad!

Until recently OT was such a bad word that we'd work dangerously short for days at a time. Then the professional responsibiblity complaints started piling up and now we have approval to call in OT to fill the gaps to staff us to 16 nurses per shift. If we can get people to come in... That kind of OT is different.

The nurses are supposed to fill out a "time adjustment" sheet to explain why break wasn't taken if they want paid that thirty minutes.

The problem is that if you write 3 or more of the time adjustment sheets in a three-month period, you receive a write-up. Three write-ups and you are out the door. (The last DON/DNS claimed each of the time adjustment sheets costs 35$ to process).
So the nurse just don't fill out the time adjustment sheets. Effectively saving all kinds of $$ for the company Of course, we never hear about not filling out the time adjustment sheets. And as long as OT is somewhat under contril, the administration remains quiet.

The whole situation sounds illegal.

It fries my egg to think of all the money they save off of the nurses with their devilish ways!