Johns Hopkins nurses a question?

embradsmom · Dec 21, 2013

? Anyone

Ruby Vee, BSN · Dec 21, 2013

You might get more answers if you made your question more generic. For instance, "Salary vs. Hourly Rate".

arockingroupie · Mar 10, 2014

I worked there and loved it. So salary can be broken down to hourly rates (they tell you what your hourly equivalent is) but salary means you work 40 hours a week. You can work 32 or 36 hours and still get benefits but of course you wont get paid the same.

Most units have 12 hour shifts and schedule out of 6 weeks. You work 3 shifts a week and every 3 weeks you work another 12 hour shift (the hours balance out to 40). You have to work 1 Monday, 1 Friday, and 1 weekend every 3 weeks. Some units rotate, some have enough staff for strictly days. Nights have a boost in salary and every 6 months we had $1k bonus. Some out patient areas are 10 or 12 hour days and you might be 36 hours a week or 40.

I never noticed anyone staying after to chart, maybe 30 minutes at max. They use EPIC so if we did a patient assessment we could paste and copy our previous assessment which cuts down 15 minutes Id say. Ive used Cerner and its horrible in comparison. Hopkins charts by exception so they assume everyone is healthy and if one person has 3 arms and someone else is missing a leg you would chart that, not that all my patients have round heads. (Sounds dumb but hope it makes sense).

The population can be hard...I was on a tough floor so we had a lot of the neighborhood population there. It wasnt uncommon for someone to have been admitted for a heart attack and break the rules to go outside with a PICC line and use drugs, diabetics going to the cafeteria and have 500+ blood sugars or bedbugs. The new ICU/pediatric tower is really nice but some floors still have 2 patients to a room. The doctors are typical doctors but think outside the box. Different floors have different services, there are no "med surg" floors its either medicine or surgery. There is one unit just for famous patients to be seen but they could be on any unit really, theres just a super nice one and the nurses are allowed to accept gifts.

I think its a great learning experience but not for someone that just wants to clock in and out. You will see a lot of rare diseases and there is sooooo much nursing support. If you want to start a protocol or research project it wont be shoved in a trash can like other hospitals.

MeiLana · Mar 12, 2014

arockingroupie: Thank you so much for this post -- I think you covered more 'range' of things you could see than I've ever read before.