First month working as LPN - is this a good job or a bad job?

[PeterSchmoe]

This may sound silly, but I'm honestly confused if I'm working for a good company or a bad company!

I'm a month into working my first job as an LPN (long term nursing and rehab), I have zero experience to judge whether the workload is reasonable or unreasonable - so I thought I would ask here!

My day starts at 7 am, there's about 36 patients divided between 2 nurses - 7 pegs, 2 trachs, 6 diabetics, 1 IV on one side, 1 peg, 2 diabetics, 1 IV on the other. The patients range from low functioning and requiring feeding lines and thermoregulation, to able to shuffle down a hallway but still confused. Since I started I've been playing Med Aide. Recently I've gotten better and able to finish my am meds at about 1030 on quiet days, however, those are few and far between! With just 2 nurses (another who is new as well) working a usually busy floor (social worker tracking us down to write orders, doctors visiting, phone constantly ringing, dealing with family, paperwork etc etc) there's a lot of having to stop passing meds and returning to the nurses station for god knows what or how long it will take.

Then there's the usual accuchecks, noon meds, followed by treatments (3-4 on each side) and weekly skin checks. I've only taken a lunch on 3 days since I started, I take no breaks, and I usually stay until 5 (shift ends at 3) finishing treatments and charting.

Now the company part!

Apparently a new company came in and bought out the old company, completely changing the way things were done right before I started. Lots of good (from what I hear) people were fired, there's tons of politics going on, a DON put in place who seems detached from the floor, an ok ADON who is helpful but scowls and makes you feel ashamed for asking for help, and an amazing "assistant" to the ADON (once competitor, I guess) who is involved, easy to talk to, views us as being "their" nurses and genuinely wants to help, and is the only reason I chose to stay.

We have meetings which usually consist of about 45 min - 2 hours of the DON putting down the previous company, threatening us with the "with us or against us" speech, and how you need to leave if you're not going to be in line with how they want to do things. The biggest change from what the other nurses tell me - redundant charting, MANY more forums added, much more documentation, and prompt write ups for missing a forum or improperly filling it out.

The positive is that all the nurses have bonded over their dislike for the new company, absolutely no one likes what the job has "become," and everyone in my station is either actively looking for another job, planning to, or taken the "Screw it, I'm gonna do the best I can and to Hell if I get fired.." attitude.

So anyway, I'm confused if this is just what nursing in ltc is like, if the grass is truly greener in the want ads section (lucky to live in a city with NUMEROUS open positions), if I should just ride this out and deal with the threats and write ups as they come, or pull out and protect my license and sanity. I'm extremely tempted to pull the DON aside and explain that we're all on the same team, and rather than build us down she needs to be building us up - I already have the "I don't care" attitude regarding this job.

The only part in all this that scares me is that with all we're tasked to do, with 2 new nurses fresh out of school figuring the job out, the paper work out as we go - there's too much of an opportunity for us to miss something important and get a ding on our license. The 5 day "orientation" was essentially setting us up to be med aides, we're still unsure of much of the paperwork, let alone dealing with the transition from school to real life. The other new nurse is already pulling out and plans to leave.

So..thoughts? Advice?