Getting called off

[pottie]

I am just curious how the rest of the countries RN's are faring as far as getting called off and having to use PTO to cover regular work hours if you want a paycheck?

We get placed on call often (with no pay) and are getting called off on a regular basis. Is it the same at your hospital or are there still plenty of patients and no low census?

[landonsles]

I never thought when I became a nurse that I would have to pretty much fight for my hours...drives me crazy. Because of the way the nurses on my unit are scheduled and the feast or famine nature of L&D, there have been times that, as a full timer, I have been flexed down to less hours per week than some of our PRN's. It's getting to the point that I may have to find myself a PRN position in addition to my FT one just to get a full paycheck..

[mochabean]

People have been called off at my hospital due to low census. Everyone works the minimum 36 FT hours- no overtime. This is bad for nursing assistants who already get paid low wages and need the extra money. If I would've known this before hand I would've saved up more money.

[CrufflerJJ, BSN, RN, EMT-P]

We don't often get called off, but we will "vote someone off the island" if our census is low. We're trying to make it as fair as possible by keeping a posted tally in the nurses station that has the person, the date, and the hours given up. One of our management coordinators (AKA charge nurses) will post a graph each pay period so we can see who has "flexed" the most. We've all tried to take our turn. I don't mind -- I usually have something else I could be doing, and I have 160+ hours of PTO in my bank. Of course, working in the ED, the minute we send someone home, 6 ambulances show up on our doorstop with high-acuity patients.

In the ER, though, it's always seemed fairly easy to massively boost patient census when needed. All you need to do is have a newbie say out loud "Gosh - things sure are quiet tonight, aren't they?". They should just about be recovered from the beating received from the rest of the staff by the time the patients start streaming in.

[86toronado, BSN, RN]

We're getting called with the option to either stay home or float to another unit... I always choose float- I don't have the PTO to waste, and I don't mind working on other units.

[Lunah, MSN, RN]

In the ER, though, it's always seemed fairly easy to massively boost patient census when needed. All you need to do is have a newbie say out loud "Gosh - things sure are quiet tonight, aren't they?". They should just about be recovered from the beating received from the rest of the staff by the time the patients start streaming in.

Yes, and the act of beating the newbie results in another patient in itself!

Just last night, we were totally full/slammed with sick people and psych patients, not an empty bed at all, with a conscious sedation going on in our large trauma room where we also work our codes. So a cardiac arrest goes out, and the medic finally calls in -- the guy was obviously DOA/DRT, and they weren't going to work him. So our doc hangs up the phone, and we're all waiting to see if we need to scramble to make a space for a code. He said, "They didn't want to work him, but I told them to do it anyway because we need our census numbers to be up." We all started throwing things at him -- he's such a joker. LOL. (He was, of course, just kidding.)

[cherrybreeze, ADN, RN]

In the ER, though, it's always seemed fairly easy to massively boost patient census when needed. All you need to do is have a newbie say out loud "Gosh - things sure are quiet tonight, aren't they?". They should just about be recovered from the beating received from the rest of the staff by the time the patients start streaming in.

We had a HUC for a while on our unit that would do this ALL THE TIME, comment on how "quiet" it was, in the hopes that we'd get busier....we all wanted to beat the crap out of her. Yea, sure, I can understand if the night was slow for HER, but it wasn't necessarily slow for us! And getting admits was a whole lot more work for the RN's that it was for the HUC, who just had to put in some orders when they got there! :angryfire It would make us so mad because she thought it was funny. Ergh.

[kemper1974]

Isn't it funny how when you are hired in to the job FULLTIME nobody ever tells you that you can be put on call with no pay, flexed or cancelled and you must use your PTO to make up the difference? This week we got an email from our manager stating we cannot request vacation unless we will be sure to have enough pto hours to cover it. How the heck are we supposed to know how many PTO hours we will have in advance???

We also got another email about our "poor team spirit" because nobody wants to come in extra when they are desperate for help. Who wants to come in extra for no overtime, no oncall pay, and no extra shift bonus ($50). In the past 6 months, 9 of my co-workers (out of 60) have started new part time jobs just to make ends meet because we can't count on a full paycheck. Sadly, those are the folks who would have worked extra.