Do nurses get fired often?

Nurses Relations

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It seems like I see people talking on here constantly about how they were fired from their first job, or their last job, or know several people who were fired. Do nurses get fired a lot, especially for relatively minor errors? Is it a career ender? It just seems so odd to me, but I'm coming from a career in publishing where I only saw maybe five people fired in twelve years at several companies, and three of them were either stealing or using Media on their work computers. It's just really, really rare, so it seems totally bizarre to me to think that nurses get fired on a regular basis. Can you still get a job after that (assuming it was for something like a med error, not for stealing narcotics or violently abusing a patient or something like that)?

Specializes in med/surg/tele/LTC/homecare/correctional/.

I have noticed a disturbing pattern of new nurses getting fired. I attribute this to 2 things.

1. As soon as a nurse is eligible for medical benefits, days off and all of the other BS that is advertised, they are booted, usually at exactly 3 months.

2. The new nurse thinks she is being hired permanently, but is in fact a replacement nurse for someone out on medical leave, workers comp, etc. The employer does not want to pay for a staffing agency nurse which runs at about $65.00/hour, so they hire someone cheap, then kick them out when the other nurse returns.

I have also noticed that, in the past, hospitals will hire as many new grads as possible, also cheap, to ward off the need for agency staffing. They hire people on, when there is no actual job vacancy. They roll the dice that someone will give notice while the new nurses are in training. If that happens, a new nurse becomes permanent, and transitions off orientation. If no one leaves, the new nurse is let go at the end of orientation, and they start the process ll over again. This allows hospitals to avoid using costly agency personnel.

It sucks, really

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Specializes in Psych, Med/Surg, LTC.
I have noticed a disturbing pattern of new nurses getting fired. I attribute this to 2 things.

1. As soon as a nurse is eligible for medical benefits, days off and all of the other BS that is advertised, they are booted, usually at exactly 3 months.

2. The new nurse thinks she is being hired permanently, but is in fact a replacement nurse for someone out on medical leave, workers comp, etc. The employer does not want to pay for a staffing agency nurse which runs at about $65.00/hour, so they hire someone cheap, then kick them out when the other nurse returns.

I have also noticed that, in the past, hospitals will hire as many new grads as possible, also cheap, to ward off the need for agency staffing. They hire people on, when there is no actual job vacancy. They roll the dice that someone will give notice while the new nurses are in training. If that happens, a new nurse becomes permanent, and transitions off orientation. If no one leaves, the new nurse is let go at the end of orientation, and they start the process ll over again. This allows hospitals to avoid using costly agency personnel.

It sucks, really

:crying2: That is the saddest thing I have heard lately. I understand health care is a business. But people depend on jobs for you know, surviving. People wait to make big decisions (get married, conceive a child, buy a house, etc. and some of these things can only be put off so long before it is no longer possible) until they find full-time regular employment. Most people I know don't try to have babies until they know they have a job. You can't put that off forever. To then just snap it away without real cause is sad. This just sounds wrong. This is messing with peoples lives. There is no need to hire agency. Hire a large pool of prn/per-diem staff. A lot of smaller hospitals do it. They get no pto, no benefits, and $3.00hr more than regular staff. Most don't mind doing some weekends and some holidays, as long as they are being called for other times, too. They get work when it is available, and don't get work when it isn't. They are typically ok with dry spells due to having a full time working partner or whatever.

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I am probably going to ruffle some feathers writing this, but here goes. I totally agree with GM2RN's response about being unionized, and I'd take it one step further. I don't understand how any nurse could support politicians of a certain party (the one that starts with R and rhymes with shmepublican). Look at what's happening in the country with the states that have tried to take away union-organizing rights! That is nothing but an orchestrated, country-wide attempt to destroy the opposite side's power base, and has nothing to do with economics. And now the shmepublicans have passed laws in a couple of states allowing the governor to just neutralize local governments and school boards under the guise of "fiscal emergencies". I saw on the news last night that an entire minority suburb in Michigan was seized and "neutralized" by the governor to make a golf course, whose CEO just happened to be a crony of the governor. This type of underhandedness is also at work against nurses, and we need to exert more union and more political strength to ensure our fair treatment, and also the treatment of our fellow citizens.

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Yes, nurses do get fired often. Those that do not get fired often don't stay very long in the same place. Honestly, the facility can find a reason to fire the best nurse ever due to the workload and compromising positions we find ourselves in. Family member complaint, patient complaint, med error, etc.

Every month we have a staff roll of employee anniversaries (date of hire) and how long they have been there. Those with ten or fifteen years at the facility are never nurses, they are admin or social workers.

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Specializes in med/surg/tele/LTC/homecare/correctional/.

I have also noticed that the false "nursing shortage " propaganda helped to foster this environment of frequent firing. The more nurses there are, the quicker all nurses become a dime a dozen. Frequent firing allows for wage control and reduction, never having to give someone a raise or benefits either. This is not only true for nurses, but most other vocations within the healthcare industry.

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Specializes in LTC, Acute care.

I think I may be getting fired and I'm just holding my breath. :(

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Can a nurse get fired for entering a relationship with a doctor? We both work at the same hospital. He's been separated from his wife for 6 months and getting a divorce. We spend most of our weekends together when we're off and my son likes him. No one knows about this. Don't want some of the other nurses to know who might think it's wrong. Just want to make sure I don't get in trouble. I heard that a nurse can get in bigger trouble for this thing than a doctor. Is that true?

It depends did you get another nurse wrongfully terminated to obtain this doctor. Depending on what you have done you could lose your license. Other wise, why so worried about being fired.

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Yep. Nurses get fired for stupid reasons! If they want to get rid of you, they'll pick out the smallest mistake.

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Specializes in Thoracic Cardiovasc ICU Med-Surg.

To the nurse having an affair with a doctor--Yes that will probably bite you in the butt at some point in the future. Sleeping with a married person often does. Someone will find out, and then every single person will know.

Anyway, when I worked home health, I saw a ridiculous amount of nurses fired, usually they were the "Manager of CLinical Practice", or "Nursing Director". Usually, but not always, they were fired because they did a poor job and/or were crazy. There were times that management just decides to "clean house" and fire just about everyone.

Since coming to work at a large well known teaching hospital, I have only seen two nurses fired. One was watching movies while ostensibly taking care of IMU patients. The other was a nurse who was completely and irrevocably incompetant. He had made a number of LARGE SCARY med errors before he was THANKFULLY canned.

He is now studying for medical school! Every time I see him in the cafeteria, I pray he never becomes a doctor and instead goes into computers or something where he can't hurt people.

Short story long, it is actually pretty hard to get fired where I work. You have to have repeated breaches of policy that are documented and addressed per HR.

We had two different nurses (besides those two) make major med errors in the past year and both of them have learned from the experience and are good nurses. They were not fired.

My first manager told me ten years ago "We have nurses working here who have killed people! No one gets fired here! We need bodies!"

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Specializes in women/children, pacu, or.

Help! I just got fired because patient said I was rude! Not so. My supervisor got 3 calls w/in a month re: my rudeness & putting pts down. I've been a nurse for over 30 yrs & know this didn't happen. I asked my boss if she ever got calls from pts & she said, "No". When I asked her if this seemed strange, she said, "Yes". HR also said I wouldn't be able to collect unemployment. I guess that's what happens when one gets fired. Anyone have experience w/ this?

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No. Since you ask. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of nurses in my life and can think of fewer than 10 firings, and a couple of those were me :). And for every single one of mine, they were the best thing to happen to my career, because every single one was followed by a much better situation and opportunity.

Being fired is not the end of the world. Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, the company he created, for heaven's sake (they did hire him back later..but if they hadn't fired him there we would have no Pixar). Plenty of very successful people have been fired, not because they were bad or incompetent, but because it wasn't working out for one reason or another. I got fired once because my small hospital closed the nursing ed department to save money and they didn't need a clinical specialist or staff development nurses any more. I lost another job because the company closed the department I was in. I lost another for being a whistleblower. These were over the course of many decades of work, and I own a successful business now (and I work for myself). I wouldn't go tippy-toeing through life being afraid of the possibility. Do your best, learn what you can from every situation, and have a good life.

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Not in my neck of the woods. Government nurses are almost impossible to fire.

Case in point: former coworker who had 5 pending charges of battery against her (one that I know of for inserting a foley into an A&Ox3 patient who 1) didn't have orders for it and 2) refused it) and numerous chemo errors on her record. She was always late, had a poor attitude and refused to check chemo with the charge nurse on rounds.

Second example: an LPN who routinely gave the wrong medications to the wrong patients (example: the wrong kind of insulin to the wrong patient at the wrong time) and liked to spike blood products despite hospital policies mandating that LPNs were not allowed to do so.

In both cases, neither of these people were fired, though several of my superiors tried their best.

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