Burnt out LTC New Grad with Care Now Interview

prettyinblu · Dec 31, 2010

Ive never worked in that facility but i have worked in LTC for the majority of my nursing career and I must say that I always miss the $ i made in the LTC setting. Good luck

TeXasGirl29 · Jan 31, 2011

Hi all nurses, I'm a new grad LVN and have an interview at Care Now Urgent Care. I'm wondering if anyone has worked there? If so how's the lvn pay$$$, hours, atmosphere. Do you know would I be doing there? How do u guys like it?? I have been working in the nursing home since passed nclex in mid november and I am burnt out already!!! :-(( I've gone through the first interview and I am waiting on the second. Any advise, comments & experiences would be awesome!!!!
Thanks,

Hello,

I am new to this website! I just moved to TX from AZ. ( I grew up in TX though). Anyway, I have a few questions. I applied to Care Now also and I just went in for the pre-employment screening and I was expecting more of an interview, but it was just a detail oriented test( 50 ?'s in 12 minutes I got about half way through) and a personality test,(it had nothing to do with nursing) and she told me that I would here something in about 5-7 business days, that was it. I am just curious about the hiring process, because when they called me they sounded really interested and then I went in for that and I am just nervous, I really need to start working. How was the process for you?

starsgirl78 · Mar 29, 2011

I worked at Care Now for over a year. Care Now pays really well for LVN's. The starting rate when I started was $16.50 an hour and you get night and weekend differential plus quarterly bonuses. With all the diff and bonuses, I was averaging $22-24 an hour. Depending on the clinic where you end up and the time of year, it can be a very busy, fast-paced environment. Your duties are to room patients, take vitals, administer injections and treatments, triage patients, answer nurse phone calls, discharge patients, clean rooms and the rest of the clinic, audit charts, and filing.

Now on to the brutally honest part. It's not an employee-friendly place to work. The reality of the job is much different than the job they tell you about during the hiring process. They have a pretty significant turnover and not just with clinical staff. Clinic managers rarely stay in their position for very long, so management is pretty inconsistent.

Their major emphasis is on running every clinic the exact same way. They do not make changes at one clinic without making it at all clinics. Policy changes are frequent and very random. I do not exaggerate when I say that you are responsible for remembering every single policy in the handbook to the letter. This is difficult to keep up with since the policy manual is a 3" binder and the policies are constantly being revised. It was not uncommon to be handed a 1/4" thick stack of revisions to review and sign every month or so.

They do not have a rotating schedule and you will not necessarily work 5 shifts a week with rotating weekends. You may work 10 days or more without a day off. You are not allowed to work overtime without express authorization from your regional manager or corporate or YOU risk getting written up, so your 10 day stint will likely be over a weekend and you will have short shifts to avoid OT. (My longest stretch was 12 days in a row.) Schedule requests must be submitted at least a month in advance. PTO is never guaranteed. Previously scheduled and agreed upon days off are very often interrupted by requests to come in and fill a shift. Don't take calls on your day off if you aren't willing to go in! Nights do not rotate. Weekends do not rotate. I had a period of time where I was scheduled every day of every weekend for 3 months straight. You won't know your schedule a full month in advance, though they say you will. There were times that the schedule came out so late, I did not know if I was to work the following day or not.

There is no calling in sick. They give you a phone list of all the nurses at all the clinics in DFW and if you want to call in, you need to call every single one until you get your shift covered. Family emergencies don't matter either. I had a coworker whose preschooler was in the hospital with pneumonia. She still had to come in because she could not find someone to cover her shift.

All charting is done by hand. All charts are audited by the "nurses" at the end of the shift, randomly by management, and also quarterly by auditors from the corporate office. Every nurse has a quarterly audit and your audit score affects whether you will receive a quarterly bonus or be written up. They are looking for major areas like blank spaces, misspellings, corrections, and also minor things like not using quotation marks correctly. Depending on your auditor, they count off for different things. I was once marked off for not dotting a lowercase "i". Seriously.

Every minor infraction is turned into a major one. I was once called into the office for a "discussion" with management because I stapled a chart on the wrong side. I was directed to the policy regarding how charts were put together, "re-trained", and had to sit through the same lecture later with the regional manager for the same incident. Remember the movie Office Space? If you screw up, you have to hear about it from 8 bosses? It's like that.

Each individual clinic is graded on certain standards that determine the amount of your quarterly bonus. Bonus range from $0 - $2.50/hour maximum. It's based on corporate's inspection of the clinic, patient satisfaction, revenue, and wait time. Standards change arbitrarily. My clinic achieved the highest level of bonus one quarter. It was nice! The following quarter, a memo was issued saying that the qualifications for bonuses had changed. It became far more difficult, if not almost impossible, to achieve the maximum. If a clinic excelled in one area, then faults would be sought out in other areas. Depending on the clinic manager, you can lose your bonus for the slightest infraction. I was fortunate enough to never lose my bonus, but a coworker lost hers because the shoes she wore were not solid white and she was written up.

You have a mandatory "nurse" meeting every quarter. It's at the corporate headquarters in Coppell. It's about 3 hours long and a good portion of the meeting is reviewing policy and going over incidents that occurred in the clinic and how they could have been handled differently. Or, more accurately, what clinic staff did wrong. Every situation ranging from patients falling in the parking lot to horseplaying kids being injured.

The patient is ALWAYS right. They are walking wallets first, patients second. Upset a patient and you are guaranteed that management will launch a full investigation. This is the one time that they will use a policy you DO follow against you. "You should have known. . ." A PA was reprimanded after a complaint from an angry patient because she refused to issue ongoing refills for a narcotic cough syrup. It was policy that they do not prescribe any narcotic for long-term use - that needs to be done by the pt's PCP. The patient raised enough stink that corporate refunded his money and the PA was reprimanded for her poor customer service.

There are many, many, many more stories I can tell you. The job itself was fun. I loved my coworkers. I enjoyed my patients. But I absolutely hated the company.

One final thing. You may have noticed I used the word "nurse" in quotes. At Care Now, you do not have to have a license for them to consider you a "nurse". Anyone in the back office is a "nurse". MA's, EMT's, it doesn't matter. Additionally, you do not have to be certified to be a medical assitant. Often, corporate will choose to pull patient reps or even hire people off the street and train them through Care Now's program to be MA's and lab techs. No experience necessary! It's basically a crash course in Care Now policy and their duties are the exact same as a licensed nurse. Someone who takes an 8 week course will be turned loose to administer medications, assist in procedures, and answer "nurse" calls from patients. Anyone in the back office can answer a nurse call and never once did I ever hear anyone identify themselves as anything other than a Nurse.

So, that's my Care Now experience in a nutshell!

tiredstudentmom · Apr 7, 2011

starsgirl78, I am truly sorry that you have had such a trying job experience! Hopefully you will or have found something that is much better suited for you.

lcvidal · Sep 21, 2011

Hi! Just saw your post. I am going for a prescreen interview for Care Now tomorrow and wanted to see if you could give me any advice?

Thanks!