Anyone here quit after being on orientation and thinking of leaving nursing altogether? I started my first job in January and am about to finish my orientation at the end of this month... The problem is, I am miserable! I hate the acute care setting, the continuous stress, and the understaffing. I am about to get off orientation at the end of the month but I already KNOW that hospital nursing is not for me. I feel guilty about leaving after the time they invested in me to orient but I really hate it!! I also feel like a failure for not being able to finish what I started... nursing was my 2nd degree (have a BA in psychology) but now I am seriously considering that nursing may not be for me and want to switch career paths again.
Has anyone else quit their first job... how easy was it to find a second job in nursing? Also, I don't think I want to be a nurse in a hospital anymore but it seems like every other job (public health nurse, home health nurse, case management, etc.) that I am more interested in wants at least 1-2 years acute care experience. Would I be considered a failure in the eyes of the managers if I leave the hospital world after only 3 months? Am I still marketable as a nurse? (I wouldn't be leaving on unfavorable terms)
Thanks for any advice or for anybody else sharing their experiences to commiserate with me!
Find work in hospitals that are smaller and in communities that are middle class or upper middle class. Hospitals in nice parts of a town that service a population of serious working class people. You're more likely to be exposed to a nicer clientele. I worked in a resort town for some years where there were a lot of very wealthy people. It was great. Everyone was happy.
I dunno ... there are always exceptions but .. I've been treated much worse by white, upper middle class patients who expect hospitals to be hotels and feel they should be waited on hand and foot. My easiest patients have been dirt poor immigrants who don't take healthcare for granted and appreciate the fact that someone is taking care of them at all ...
Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
I've been treated much worse by white, upper middle class patients who expect hospitals to be hotels and feel they should be waited on hand and foot. My easiest patients have been dirt poor immigrants who don't take healthcare for granted and appreciate the fact that someone is taking care of them at all ...I guess everybody's experience is different ...
Oh, I've had the same too. It's just that it's not something that goes on all the time. By and far it was much nicer to care for the white, upper middle class patients is all I was saying. I've had some pretty bad treatment by a couple of indigents I'd just as soon forget. I got scabies from one of them, thank you very much.
I think if you feel unsafe or are working in questionable conditions, then it's OK to leave IMHO. I worked part time a night as a psych tech in a local psych hospital (my regular FT job was social work in ICMS in the same county). I left after about 2 months...I'm not even sure if I completed orientation since I only worked like 2 nights a week. I called the HR person that hired me and left her a message that I would not be coming back. I turned in my badge and keys. I left for a multitude of reasons. I received little training and was expected to know how to take vitals, bathe and toilet...with a BA in psych my only training was in social services, not medical. So many staffing shortages, no one to train me. I was fine with doing everything I was told, but I needed training to do it! I can help toilet a Geri patient, but I need to know how to hold them and such. An LPN on the geri ward was verbally abusive to the patients (yelling). The peds/adolescent ward nurses basically let the kids run wild. The dual ward had a tech that let a male patient give her a back rub in the lounge! The adult unit LPN told me that eventually I'd be alone on a ward overnight with 30+ patients and wanted to know if I could defend myself!? I was involved in a code with a patient that was given a sedative shot, but then bum rushed the nurse that gave it..I shouted to him in time to avoid attack, but he body slammed the patient and she got bruised up. I sat in the isolation room with the patient, shackled to a bed, screaming all night. I left the next day. The icing on the cake was a fellow tech telling me that a patient I had admitted (patient from my day job) told me she wished she had stabbed me in my agency car. I was transporting her back home when she pulled a knife in my car and cut her hand. I pulled over, did first aid and got her back to her family's house. She bled in my car, had Hep C and I'm 99% sure she had HIV (never consented to testing but prostituted herself for drugs to people who had HIV). As soon as I got her inside her home, I called 911 to have her admitted. I didn't want to call 911 while on the road...I was afraid that I would agitate her and she would stab me. So I downplayed her having a knife and being high as a kite...but called 911 as soon as I could. I quit my social work job a few weeks later. Too dangerous. Now I'm going to nursing school next spring hopefully. I'm really hoping that if I do psych nursing, not all of the hospitals are as messed up as the one I worked for.
I think if you feel unsafe or are working in questionable conditions, then it's OK to leave IMHO.
Treehawk, I'm sorry to hear that you had a bad experience on a psych ward. And I'm sure you will do great as a nurse. I do want to remind you and others that it is not always easy to just...LEAVE...I live in a very rural northern state. The population of my state is 800,000 people. We have an 81 bed hospital in my communtiy and the next closest hospital is 140 miles away. We can't all just leave, and go a few blocks down the street to another 800 bed hospital. So there lies the problem. We don't have any specialties here and ship many of our patients to larger facilities that are able to handle these special patients. So, don't just say, leave, that is not always an option for many of us rural nurses. So many of us are stuck in a facility that has 5 STAR HOTEL written next the the Emergency sign. My hospital is so busy promoting itself as a luxury accomodation, that it forgets that these people are here to be treated for illnesses, not a resort where you go for a retreat. And this is not the only hospital that is doing this. Our patients are requesting bottled water and wondering which night we serve prime rib. It has gotten way out of hand and I do believe I speak for many nurses out there. My managements goal is not my goal and it is not what I went to school to do. It is not about illness anymore, it is about money. It is big business and that is the bottom line. If you want to go into nursing because you truly care about the patients and want to make them better, choose a place to work that has that for its mission statement.
That stinks Lorster I didn't realize that sort of thing was going on in hospitals...with the 5 star treatment expectation...I should have expected it though I suppose. I'm new to the healthcare part of wellness since my training/degree has been in just psych. The profitability margin really needs to be removed from healthcare. Fat Cat CEO's don't need to be making tons of money off of sick people. I realize people need to make good salaries (especially nurses!) but it seems a lot that the industry puts profit before wellness. This is happening in mental heath too, but not as much as in medical I guess.
Also, I've only lived in NJ/PA (lots of places to choose from), so you're right about some rural nurses not having much of a choice. I remember trying to find MH facilities and psychiatrists for patients in upstate NY...insanely difficult. And child psychiatrists...forget it! Non existent!
That stinks Lorster I didn't realize that sort of thing was going on in hospitals...with the 5 star treatment expectation...I should have expected it though I suppose. I'm new to the healthcare part of wellness since my training/degree has been in just psych. The profitability margin really needs to be removed from healthcare. Fat Cat CEO's don't need to be making tons of money off of sick people. I realize people need to make good salaries (especially nurses!) but it seems a lot that the industry puts profit before wellness. This is happening in mental heath too, but not as much as in medical I guess.
Also, I've only lived in NJ/PA (lots of places to choose from), so you're right about some rural nurses not having much of a choice. I remember trying to find MH facilities and psychiatrists for patients in upstate NY...insanely difficult. And child psychiatrists...forget it! Non existent!
Yeah, the sad part about mental health is that there is little money allocated for it in comparison to how many mental health problems exist in our country. I don't know if we as a society just do not want to recognise it as a problem or if the govt just does not feel that it is worth funding, maybe both and more. If my hospital would put more of its budget into nursing care and less into advertising, there would not be so many burned out nurses and the patients would actually get really great care. I love my profession but lets face it, we lack the power to change the institutions where we work, we lack solidarity, we are worked, to death and have no energy after working 12 hours at the bedside. We have to deal with abusive doctors and many times management will not defend us. We are supposed to be patient advocates but cannot say anything for fear of stepping on someones toes. I'm really tired of fighting an uphill battle. Walmart is looking better and better all the time.
Sheri257
3,905 Posts
I dunno ... there are always exceptions but .. I've been treated much worse by white, upper middle class patients who expect hospitals to be hotels and feel they should be waited on hand and foot. My easiest patients have been dirt poor immigrants who don't take healthcare for granted and appreciate the fact that someone is taking care of them at all ...
I guess everybody's experience is different ...
:typing