Hi. ANY advice is appreciated here. I am a 15 year veteran RN who just got terminated for something so trivial I am embarrassed to post it here. It has nothing to do with patient care. I have never made a med error, never received a patient or family complaint, in fact I get commendations almost daily with many "You are the best nurse I have ever had." I LOVE my job and I think it shows. I work well with and am well respected by my peers, CNA's, physicians I work with, and other staff and am friendly with everyone from the Attendings to housekeepers.
I have worked several units, but this last one I have witnessed the worst favoritism, discrimination, and no support from management than any other unit I have worked. My coworkers are hardworking (some bad apples, like every unit) and we have come to work well together as a team for the most part bc management does not support us, unless of course we are this manager's "pets" and do favors for her. Things started to get really bad and my vacation requests would not get approved when others with much less seniority got approved, and I started to complain. Things got even worse and I started getting written up for trivial things, having NOTHING to do with patient care. I had never been written up before. I went to HR and filed complaints. HR of course "found no merit" to my complaints, even though many of my coworkers confided to me and complained about the same things for years, even before I transferred to this unit. Out of fear of losing their jobs they would not complain to HR. Of course I tried to transfer but the writeups prevented them.
My biggest fear was that this manager would retaliate and try to fire me because of the complaints I filed. I tried to tell HR this. But my prediction came true and this manager found another trivial write up that she used to terminate me bc I was on final warning from the last 2 trivial write ups. trust me the write ups have nothing to do with my performance as a nurse, they were for things all nurses forget to do once in a while such as forgetting to do a valuables checklist when transferring a patient from one room to another---writeups no one else was getting written up for. So now that this manager term'd me, she is bragging about it, my coworkers are scared to death themselves of getting fired, and they are upset that this happened to me. I was a nurse who helped everyone, even when I was busy, even if I knew that nurse talked behind my back if she needed an IV for her hard stick patient, i would do the IV for the good of the patient. I am appealing the termination to get re-instated, even though I was so stressed there for the longest time. always afraid of getting written up, and fired. Even though I have overwhelming evidence that this manager is retaliating, HR seems to be siding with her. I am thinking of filing charges with EEOC. Is there anything else I can do, anyone else I can contact, would writing a letter to MAGNET or the CEO of my hospital help?
I am in step one of the appeal process, but I do not feel anyone is on my side. I plan to go on to step two and all the way to step three of the appeals process just to be heard, I am not naive enough to think I will get my job back although I'd love to be reinstated just to quit. No matter what proof I provide HR twists it, and I don't see how they will reinstate me bc this would undermine this manager and her boss' decision. I don't even want the job back to be honest, it is a sad unit with management that truly does not value their employees. I feel bad for my coworkers stuck there. Does anyone have any advice? I agree with an earlier post I read somewhere, "the truth gets a good nurse in trouble". Administration is not interested in the truth.
Thanks for any advice.