After 20 MONTHS of job search.....i give up.

[skny]

So, after 20 months of looking for work as a nurse, i've officially given up. Im putting the mistake of going to school to become a nurse behind me and moving fwd as a receptionist. If i knew wasting all that time, and money going to school was only going to give me $60,000 of debt i would have done something more productive. Do you know what a 60,000 vacation could be like. But i'm just stuck with debt and a BSN that will never get used cause no one wants to hire me!!!!

If one more person tells me to apply to North Shore, I'm gonna smack them. Does everyone really think I never heard of them and i didnt apply there.

I hate what not having a job has done to me. Ive become an ANGRY, BITTER person that HATES PEOPLE. I cant say I hate nursing cause no one has ever given me a chance to work. SO, I HATE THE PROCESS OF BECOMING A NURSE and looking for a job as a nurse. I HATE all the people I tutored in school for them to pass their classes, my so called "friends", who ive never heard from again since they got jobs!!!

[doegirl]

I wish I have some words of encouragement, but unfortunately I don't.

This whole "nursing shortage" phenomena has been played to the max by colleges and universities. Many individuals have gone thousands into debt only to find themselves unemployed indefinitely. It's a scam, and the educational institutions are making money hand over fist.

Look at this link. In 2009, the state of New York had 12,500 graduates of nursing programs. There were about 5300 open RN positions for the year in the state. For the lucky few that landed a job, count your blessings.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/minnecon/archive/2010/06/nursing-supply-and-demand-out-of-whack.shtml

[DoGoodThenGo]

I wish I have some words of encouragement, but unfortunately I don't.

This whole "nursing shortage" phenomena has been played to the max by colleges and universities. Many individuals have gone thousands into debt only to find themselves unemployed indefinitely. It's a scam, and the educational institutions are making money hand over fist.

Look at this link. In 2009, the state of New York had 12,500 graduates of nursing programs. There were about 5300 open RN positions for the year in the state. For the lucky few that landed a job, count your blessings.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/minnecon/archive/2010/06/nursing-supply-and-demand-out-of-whack.shtml

One has to understand every local healthcare market is different. There are places in the United States that are begging for nurses even newly licensed ones, but they may not be where *you* are and or people want to go.

The healthcare market in New York City and to an extent New York State are facing huge challenges many that have been known about for ages. For instance NYC has long known there are too many hospitals with overlapping services in some areas while others go without.

If one lives in Manhattan and has good to excellent insurance or just plain ole wealth then the world is your oyster. You can pick and choose amoung several world class facilities. OTHO if you are poor or even middle class, without decent or any insurance then you have take whatever you can get.

Over the past five or so years NYC has had about six major private hospitals close. Others were merged and or purchased by healthcare networks. Yet the area still has the same number of nursing programs churning grads out like clockwork every six or twelve months. Indeed the supply has grown as more schools add ABSN programs.

If it wasn't for the dire financial straits most area hospitals find themselves in hiring of nurses by hospitals probably would experience an uptick, but that alone may not be enough to absorb the hundreds of new grads coming out each year.

Finally we cannot discount the nature of healthcare delivery is changing. More and more is being done in ACF and or patient homes/out patient settings. As hospital bed use shrinks the need for community nursing is growing, but it seems a majority of nurses prefer hospital gigs.

Bad as things may be now there is the huge question of what is going to happen with several private hospitals in Brooklyn. A commission is meeting to decide their fate and that could range from closures, mergers, to being sold to private corporations. Either way it could mean one or two less hospitals and scores of experienced nurses hitting the streets looking for work.

[skny]

i got a job!!!!!!!!! pending passing the pharm exam

[DoGoodThenGo]

i got a job!!!!!!!!! pending passing the pharm exam

It's about d**n time Missy!

Good luck on the pharma exam and knock em dead on the floor/unit. Well not literally of course! *LOL*

[aye125RN]

i got a job!!!!!!!!! pending passing the pharm exam

Congrats you deserved this, where will you be working?

[mb1949]

Good for you, congratulations, it gives me hope, I am 20 months and around 50k in debt, so discouraging,

[Mentalageis16]

Dont get discouraged yet, I'm still in NRS 110 lol!

Chances are, if they close hospitals, the population will be under served. That means patients will crowd into other hospitals, that means the number of RNs will need to increase in other hospitals in order to compensate the increase number of patients. If hospital revenue goes up because of more patients coming in, then they will consider hire more RNs! : ) Well, this is the way I think about it, Hospitals don't have a control over how many patients they might receive and they can't refuse seeing patients just because their facility are too crowded. Something will eventually work out at some point although I don't know exactly.

Also, take a consideration that a lot nurses are well experienced and demands a higher income. Hospitals will more likely to hire new grads because they are cheap even with the cost of training.

60% of jobs are in hospital and 40% are else where, the matter of the fact is, why do we all want a hospital based job, you don't even know if you live until 65, your SS will pay your retirement pension, we may not even have a retirement pension after 30 years. So why not try to dig in and find more places to apply other than hospitals?

The more time you waste at home just because you try to get in a hospital job, the more money you are loosing plus time!

So try different places to apply and you might be suprised of how many jobs you can get : ) This occupation is not suitable for everyone, but for everyone out there who works hard and stay on top of the ladder, you will find a job!

[fltnrse2, ASN, RN]

It looks to me as if you don't understand how valuable you are. You can have all of the physicians and all the open hospital beds, but without the nursing personal to care for the client the physicians can not admit. I've been in nursing since 1971 and the story hasn't changed in all of those years. Here is how I see it. It's all about the money! If hospitals can get a seasoned nurse to do the job of two or three nurses they will. Until nuses stand up together and collectively say no! nothing is going to change. Please don't give up, you are a valuable asset and the hospitals know this, now you have to beleive it. The other ploy is when an institution finds a new grad who is hungry to practice the administration will use this to thier advantage by low ballling an offer. My suggestion is to say "no thank you" so and so has already made me a much better offer. You have to learn to play thier games! FLTNRSE@

[Mentalageis16]

:) how can you say "no thank you" to a job when you have already been waiting for 22 mos + without any money coming into the pocket? I don't think it's a game between RNs and hospitals. it's reality about putting foods on the plates, in this economy especially.

Plus, if they offer you a job, and you refused it because of low wage and you don't have any previous experience, what does that make of you? :)

I don't believe a high salary guarantees you a happier life but it certainly won't hurt you if you are working just for enough money to terminate your debt.

[DoGoodThenGo]

It looks to me as if you don't understand how valuable you are. You can have all of the physicians and all the open hospital beds, but without the nursing personal to care for the client the physicians can not admit. I've been in nursing since 1971 and the story hasn't changed in all of those years. Here is how I see it. It's all about the money! If hospitals can get a seasoned nurse to do the job of two or three nurses they will. Until nuses stand up together and collectively say no! nothing is going to change. Please don't give up, you are a valuable asset and the hospitals know this, now you have to beleive it. The other ploy is when an institution finds a new grad who is hungry to practice the administration will use this to thier advantage by low ballling an offer. My suggestion is to say "no thank you" so and so has already made me a much better offer. You have to learn to play thier games! FLTNRSE@

No offence but have you been following this poster's sad tale of woe and misery?

She is *not* an experienced nor seasoned nurse but a rank new grad out of school nearly two years and has been shaking the trees to find work since then only to get nothing.

It is her misfortune to have graduated just after (or maybe a bit before) two major Catholic hospitals in Queens closed. If that wasn't enough about a year or so later Saint Vincent's Manhattan quickly shut down. Add to this Baley Seton on Staten Island, Victory Memorial in Brooklyn and Harlem General and you have hundreds of experienced nurses looking for work.

All during this crisis the scores of nursing programs in NYC and it's surrounding areas have kept churning out hundreds of grads every six to twelve months. Bad as the market is for seasoned RNs, for new grads it can be down right abysmal.

So the pay may, hours, shifts may not be what the poster or any new grad with little to nil experience may wish; that is still no reason to turn up one's nose at an offer.

Take that gig and start to build up your skills and nursing experience. Then when something else comes along you'll be ready.

[Tankweti]

I would like to offer the following: http://nymag.com/news/features/68991/

This is an article about the precarious state of NY hospitals. Here is a clip from the article:

"Unlike St. Vincent’s shuttering, most of these closures took place in neighborhoods with little political clout or public visibility, and few people outside the affected communities appeared to notice. That is unlikely to remain the case. The financial distress of New York hospitals is not evenly distributed, but it is nearly universal. Even the largest and most prestigious institutions—New York–Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, and the like—get by with thin margins and significant piles of debt. Some presumed high-quality hospitals, like Beth Israel and Roosevelt, operated by the Continuum Health Partners consortium, have a legacy of steep losses and indebtedness, and are considered precarious. In New York’s many community hospitals, which provide an essential first line of defense in the effort to safeguard public health, the danger of failure is particularly acute. Combine growing costs, decreasing revenues, and high debt loads, and you can’t dig out. Then what happens? “If you’ve accumulated any reserve over time,” an executive at a major local hospital says, “the first thing you do is eat it up. Then you cut costs on staffing and support services, sometimes below levels you know are safe. Then you stop spending money to keep your physical plant and equipment up to date. The condition of the physical plants of many New York City hospitals is staggering. Then, when there’s nothing else you can do, you declare bankruptcy. That’s the life cycle of a New York hospital.”

"Indeed, it may turn out that profound problems with the ways health care is paid for, combined with the inherent disadvantages of doing business in New York, will make it virtually impossible for all but a small number of the city’s hospitals to stay afloat. If that’s the case, the health of low-income and minority residents will be most affected, but even New Yorkers who currently have access to high-quality care will feel the impact. Remaining hospitals, struggling to cope with the costs imposed by an influx of new, mostly poor patients left behind by the places that shut down, will increasingly be overcrowded and understaffed. Services will be curtailed. Facilities will be degraded. Long waits and uneven care could become the norm."

“We’ve got a lot of hospitals in trouble,” says Kenneth Raske, the president and CEO of the Greater New York Hospital Association. “More closures will undoubtedly take place. I’ve been doing this job since 1984, and people used to say I was crying wolf when I warned about a crisis. No one says that anymore. In some communities, we’re one epidemic away from a disaster.”

So, what will happen to the poor when many if not all community hospitals are shut down and only places like Mt. Sinai remain? Just remember what the rules are: a patient can be brought to the E.R. and the E.R. is only required to stabilize that person and discharge them, that's all. They may hold them on a gurney in the hallway (that happened to me once back in the 1990's with a case of food poisoning and I laid there for 24 hours because there were no beds) but if there are no beds, then there are none and the patient will have to be discharged. Hospitals do not have to expand their facilities and hire more nurses, even if the patient population becomes overwhelming for any one institution. And besides, expansion takes time and money. Most of the influx of patients will be the poor who either have Medicaid or no insurance at all. That is not conducive to adding more beds or building another wing for millions of dollars.

We have all been lead to believe all these years that we must do anything and everything to help a patient. Patients must all get top flight treatment, no matter the cost or even the futility sometimes. That is nonsense and we are about to hit the economic wall that proves it. Top flight medical care, just like top flight anything, is all about the money. And if the money is not there, people who do not have private resources will be minimally treated and sent home to die. This is what has been happening in Sub-Saharan Africa for years. And it is not as if they don't count because they are "only Africans"; their lives are just as precious as anyone's here. In the USA, we are used to getting access to care and having no idea how much it costs because someone else is always paying for it, whether private insurance or the government.

As an example of costs, I recall in nursing school when we were talking about a burn patient (a firefighter and hence a "worthy individual") who had burns over 60% of his body. He underwent multiple skin grafts and spent months on a burn unit and was eventually discharged in relatively good shape. I watched the video of all the procedures and then I asked our teacher "what about the cost" and she said it had run into the millions. I thought to myself, "Millions of dollars to save this one human being? Why are millions not spent to save, say, a Sub-Saharan African who has had a massive burn injury? Are they worth any less as human beings?" I asked the teacher if we as a society can afford investing so much resources into one person and my colleagues looked horrified and I asked who was going to pay this bill. One of my colleagues raised his hand and scoffed and said, no worry, the insurance company will pay. I remember laughing. The insurance company is us. We all pay and this is why premiums are so high and rising and why health care costs are rising: to help cover such expenses and for those who have no insurance.

Point is, we have had a long history of taking extreme measures for each individual person. None of us are used to getting no for an answer re: health care. We all think that hospitals will just have to expand and hire to accomodate the masses of the very poor when they have nowhere else to go re: the article I referenced in the link above.

Wrong. That will not happen. These people, including children and the elderly, will die and there will be many of them and there will be nothing anyone can do about it.

As far as being hired in hospitals, there is a good reason hospitals want only experienced nurses. I hear over and over that even new grads are being saddled with 7-10 acutely ill patients per shift. This would never have been done previously but it is being done now because of the influx of unemployed and uninsured patients that hospitals are grappling with. So few people, having been laid off, have private insurance any more. And it was private insurance that paid better and helped keep hospitals afloat. It is a domino effect.

I believe that we cannot expect to see an upsurge in nurse hiring in hospitals. They have learned that they can ride the razor's edge re: staffing and will continue to do so as a business model. We will probably be stuck with this for at least a generation, if not permanently.

As far as being hired by other institutions, it is difficult. Many of the nursing homes where I live now want nurses with 1-2 years acute care experience before they will hire. Home care wants 3-5 years, because you have to operate on your own without supervision. Medicaid will only pay for one nurse at a time, they will not pay for two nurses on a case so one can be trained. I have recently begun to see hiring bonues being offered for nurses, but only for experienced nurses. I saw one for a case manager (they wanted someone with 10 years experience, plus other specifics) and they were offering a $10,000 sign on bonus. But that, of course, is not for new grads.

Many of us will fall by the wayside in nursing and will wind up doing something else. It is not what we want but it does not matter what we want. We are at the mercy of the capitalist health care system.

And, by the way, Do Good and Then Go is correct. I did some research and found that, in NYS alone, there are about 25 schools of nursing (counting Associates and Bachelors programs). If you figure they each have 2 graduations per year, May and December, and that the average graduating class size is 50 new nurses, then 100 new nurses per year per school times 25 schools equals 2,500 new nurses being pumped out by NYS alone every year. Most institutions who hire nurses, from what I have been able to figure from friends, online postings, etc. hire anywhere from 7 to 18 at the most per year. What will happen to the rest? Schools dont care about this and do not even provide job placement, as they know they cannot. They are well aware that they are graduating more than what the market can bear, so how can they get involved in job placement when there are insufficient jobs? In my area, the local community college has a 4-5 year wait list for the nursing program as the prospective students are still in Never Never Land about nursing being a recession proof profession and the fact that you can "work anywhere as a nurse", which is not true for new grads.

[fltnrse2, ASN, RN]

I don't know if this is an option for you, but have you considered moving out of NYC? I know a lot of travelers who take assignments in NYC because of the money they are offered, additionally the hospitals save money because they don't have to pay benefits. I encourage you not to give up. You have worked to hard to get your license, something will come along....FLTNRSE2