anyone doing shifts stuck working unpaid time?

[Elektra6, ASN, BSN, RN]

Went somewhere with my patient and his primary nurse yesterday. I was scheduled early, she came in 2 1/2 hours later. I wound up working 3 unpaid OT hours. Now they want me to go out with them again and this outing would require me to work 8-10 unpaid hours! I'm going to discuss this with my agency, but how many of you do this on a regular basis? I'm not concerned being exactly on the clock. I stay until I finish or stay the odd 1/2 hour to wait for relief.

I'm thinking home health is not for me, the primary nurses are considered family, they use the patients and their friends as another social life and violate all kinds of boundary issues that the fill-in nurses have to deal with. The agency is fine with anything as long as the family doesn't complain and the shifts get covered.

Need some advice, thanks

[caliotter3]

I've been told I couldn't report 15 minutes early on my time sheet due to the necessity of counting a large amount of controlled meds accurately, getting report, and relieving the offgoing nurse on time. The case was shared by two agencies and I was relieving nurses from the second agency. The reasoning given was that the payor would not pay for two nurses covering the same amount of time. Simple response for me: I stopped coming in early and did not worry (out of courtesy) how much of my shift the other nurse stayed over. Problem for her agency. Not me. There have been numerous other times that I have been shorted on my paycheck for OT when I could not leave on time b/c no relief showed up or didn't show up on time. It was brought to my attention that nurses that weren't there as late as 45 minutes after the start of their shift, were getting paid b/c they falsified their time sheet with the help of the family member signing off. As long as the family is part of the problem of fraudulent time sheets, the agencies tend to let things slide. If you bring a problem of this nature to their attention, you get labeled as a troublemaker and may or may not win the battle for the money owed to you. Then you have to decide whether it is worth staying with this kind of employer. The best advice I can give as an individual is to refrain from giving 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there for the patient's benefit and the benefit of the family. They will get used to it, expect it, and will begin these little schemes with nurses and their time sheets. Once started, it can be a terrible problem to deal with.