abandonment

I would document everything and request a meeting with the DON and head of HR. Have the nurse that you covered for write a statement and the nurse that was supposed to cover you.

I would give my notice and get out of there if management knowing allows an unstable individual to be in charge, you need to leave immediately

it really doesn't matter what the facility says abandonment is.

if i may chime in, the above is true. according to my nursing guide to practice by the office of professions, for you to have committed patient abandonment, you must have established a nurse-patient relationship, which begins when "the nurse accepts responsibility for providing nursing care based upon a written or oral report of patient needs." employer abandonment, on the other hand, is related to termination of your employment in a wrongful manner.

neither case applies to you, so this would not be the jurisdiction of the department. even if you've broken some internal regulation, this will not affect your license - "the department has no jurisdiction to interpret or resolve issue limited to employment and contract disputes."

good luck. you should look through the guidelines, and if it were me, i would quote the above to the manager, maybe even show her the paragraph which states that it's inappropriate for nurses to be threatened with charges of abandonment as a means of coercion. (there is such a clause!)

as an aside, i'm new to this business, so i am reading the guidelines like a bible. i am getting the general impression from guidelines and faq's that many nurses may have been concerned with committing abandonment and made queries, and thus has necessitate the faq's. i also read it in suzanne gordon's nursing against the odds - that employers often throw the term "abandonment" around liberally to scare nurses. from your situation, i'm now getting the idea that this might be true. (sigh.)

Definately seek legal counsel/advice. This woman sounds like a wack job.

She sounds like a sociopathic sort of person. Constantly causing problems and is known for being an angry, unhappy, weird person. I work with a couple of these. One of them is just a problem child. Once she was fired and when she was rehired, no one could believe it, but alas, there is a "shortage".

I couldn't see myself continuing to work with/for someone like that. Oh my goodness.

I agree

She screams at anyone who calls her for whatever reason when she is on call. There is no one on the unit who has not been attacked in some way

I think I worked with this woman! She was manager for several years and nothing much was done until she screamed and swore at a physician one day. She's no longer there, and I suspect she's on a "will not rehire" list.