Baptist Vs. Methodist Advice!

nursen75 · Mar 29, 2008

Lets see where I begin, I have not worked for Methodist personally but I am a former Baptist employee. Baptist to me was overall a great hospital. I started off as an LVN working med-surg over at North Central. The hospital itself is nice and all fixed up for the pt's, your co-workers are pretty helpful over there. Our pt ratio was 6:1, sometimes if we were really short staffed (which was a lot) it would be 7:1. I would sometimes work telemetry where the ratio is 5:1. They are always busy. I think they start GVN's off at around $16,they also offer what they call option-N meaning you can work for no benefits for a higher pay, night diff for LVN is $1.50 and $2 for weekends. You can work all the overtime you want and get bonuses for picking up extra shifts. The bad part is (I dont know if anything's changed because I worked for them over a year and a half ago) the hospital is staffed with a LOT of agency nurses, I am NOT saying anything bad about agency because I work agency to but what I mean is that agency nurses(with the exception if they signed a contract) don't have access to the computer for orders so with the constant admissions coming in, we were to all take turns getting admissions and when the agency nurses got admissions, they could not put any of the orders in the computer so you as a regular staff would have to do your admission work AND theirs, that initself can be overwhelming. I would always be so busy trying to catch up on my own work and would have to stop to get in the computer because they needed to know lab values, get xray results and so on. I worked the night shift and would get out sometimes at 9 in the morning instead of 7. I was going to quit to go work for Methodist but instead transferred to another Baptist-St. Luke's and LOVED it there. They are busy to but rarely rely on outside help. Like I said, North Central might be different now, go ahead and give them a try, you can always transfer to another unit or another Baptist (they have 5 facilities) after just 6 months. Sorry this was so long but hope it helps. Good Luck.