knowing when to take a job offer..

LTCNS, LPN · Jul 7, 2016

If I turned down every job offer I have received as a LPN over the past 20 years based solely on hearsay about the SNF, clinic or hospital, I would be a housewife Give it a chance and find out for yourself. Every place has it's "issues."

You just might love it :)

NotMyProblem MSN, ASN, BSN, MSN, LPN, RN · Jul 8, 2016

As a 'state auditor', I can tell you that there are lots of reasons for failing state audits. For the most part, people generally don't blatantly mistreat residents/patients and employees. So a lot of violations are discovered within the documentation.

I will give only one of MANY simple examples. According to the rules and regs for healthcare facilities, a person must be determined to be free of communicable diseases before being allowed to reside or work in a facility....hence the TB skin test. So, if the resident/employee is tested and allowed to enter the facility in its intended capacity before the results are read, the facility is cited even if the results were negative.

Being that the inspection report has to be posted and visible to the visitors, residents, and employees to see, there are some who thrive on making a big deal out of an easy-fix solution to a possible mere oversight.

In the example above, regs were not followed, no one was injured, but there is the potential to cause harm. That's the reason for the citation (aka failed inspection). People may not even bother to read the whole report or even understand what they have read, before rushing to give their interpretive two-cent contribution to the rumor mill.

But if it is of great concern to you, look up the facility on your state's community health website and review all of its past inspection reports to see what kind of issues they've had for yourself.

***FYI: helpful to know this before resigning from one position and accepting another.

Take the job and see how things go for yourself. Give it a fair chance. After all, you resigned from a position (your first position) after only 7 months of experience. You would want to be careful of accruing a number of resignations so early in your career....not many potential employers will be so gracious as to give you a chance before assuming that you're not cut from the nursing cloth.

Speaking from professional personal experience, no facility or organization is without fault...not even the regulatory departments. We don't cite every little thing that we find unless there are just too many little things uncovered during one audit.

cisneroj · Jul 11, 2016

I would take it and keep looking. I live in Florida and not one time have I worked in LTC. I have done short stay skilled nursing and drug detox. And the best place to work if you want to continue school and have high pay is a drug detox / drug treatment facility. I have worked in bad places, but always applied for more. At times I would have 3 to 4 jobs at a time, you know 1 full time and the rest PRN.

TIARA_LPN · Jul 21, 2016

I am a new LPN and I took the first job offer I received. It was at a LTC facility. I always knew LTC wasn't for me, but I needed to get some experience. I was so unhappy because I felt so out of place. I'm used to working in the hospital setting. So after a couple weeks working my second job at the LTC facility, I got a call from the Burn Trauma ICU at the hospital I worked at Fulltime. I resigned from the LTC facility. I am so overjoyed to be back in my element being that Ive been working at the hospital for 8 years and worked my way up the career ladder. :)