I have a question. There is an issue going on in my hospital at the moment and I wanted to find out how you guys were handling it in your facilities.
There is a labor law in California which states an employee must take their meal break (30 minutes) before the end of the 5th hour of work.
Are you guys following that rule in your hospitals. What is happening at my hospital is the following:
They are asking all nurses to start their breaks as early as 9am or 9pm. We all know that is almost impossible to take a lunch in the first four hours of work. That is when assessments, meds, admissions, and treatments happen.
In some instances, we have been told to start taking our breaks at 0730... which is absurd. We haven't even assessed our patients by then.
As an example, we have a unit that has a core of 8 nurses. that is four hours of lunch breaks, we have no choice to start breaks at 0730 or 0800. Management and HR is telling us that we can voluntarily decline to take a lunch that early (and put it in writing), but that means you have the chance of not taking a lunch break at all if it get's busy. But hey... that's ok because we have 3 15 minute breaks which we all take right?
