HCA StaRN contract

[nursingsprettycool17]

what happens if you break the HCA starRN contract? i hear you’re not allowed to work for any other HCA facility ever again. is this true? what if you pay off the money in full? has anybody ever broken the contract then went off to work for HCA again in the future ? what if you leave as a nurse but then come back to work as a social worker or pharmacist or something, would the blacklist still apply to you even if ur not returning as an RN again? also does breaking a contract look bad to other employers?

[another_nurse]

4 minutes ago, Jedrnurse said:

How long was the preceptorship supposed to have lasted?

There’s a designated length of time for all nurse residents... it doesn’t change. On med surg it’s 5 weeks but you take patients during this time and you can have preceptors that don’t help you so it is basically the same as being a nurse on the floor.

[Jedrnurse, BSN, RN]

35 minutes ago, another_nurse said:

There’s a designated length of time for all nurse residents... it doesn’t change. On med surg it’s 5 weeks but you take patients during this time and you can have preceptors that don’t help you so it is basically the same as being a nurse on the floor.

So that's the $10,000 orientation that people are supposed to reimburse HCA for??

[another_nurse]

3 hours ago, Jedrnurse said:

So that's the $10,000 orientation that people are supposed to reimburse HCA for??

Yes and before that you get a one month prep class where you watch computer modules. Makes no sense to me. 

[newnurse2434]

Yup 5 week "preceptorship" and a month of class/skills lab/simulation. The month of classwork didn't teach me anything that I didn't already know...My preceptorship was only 4 weeks; however, after 2 weeks I was completely on my own and taking a full patient load. This would've been fine except for the fact that the night shift charge nurses paid zero attention to patient acuity when making the assignments. But yes, HCA values their training at $10,000 (no idea where they got this number from, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just made it up)

[JadedCPN, BSN, RN]

On 11/25/2020 at 9:42 AM, newnurse2434 said:

My contract was for 10k (no relocation or sign on bonus) and I literally got 2 weeks of a preceptorship before I was practically thrown to the wolves. You can bet I'll be hiring a lawyer if they come after me to pay them back

Did your contract mention specifics about their obligations to you, such as a 5 week preceptorship?

[myoglobin, ASN, BSN, MSN]

These contracts should be contested on the grounds of “unjust enrichment” rather akin to Wendy’s or Walmart hiring someone for a $10.00 per hour job in a down economy and telling them that if they quit or are terminated they will owe the company thousands. I am a conservative, but if we allow companies to have this sort of power over our lives we will be little more than serfs to corporate America. It’s one thing to pay back a bonus or moving expenses but to for highly trained and licensed professionals to pay for their orientation is truly demeaning. Hopefully nursing unions will oppose this and class action law suits will be brought against HCA. Only public humiliation and negative impact on their stock will deter them from this. Otherwise give it a decade and Walmart will be requiring a similar contract to work in the bakery or to receive valuable customer service training as a greeter.

[mursegoals, BSN, RN]

I'm currently paying them back. We are looking to buy a house and I couldn't take the chance of it hitting my credit. The key is, if you signed a legal contract or not. I signed a promissory note for 7,500 for a 2 year, nurse internship/work agreement. Is it BS? Yes. Is it wrong? Yes. Did I get 7,500 dollars in training? Hell no. But did I sign the contract and not fulfill my work agreement? Yes and I've def learned a valuable lesson not to sign work agreement contracts. Sometimes doing the right thing sucks and it's not fair, but I need to recognize my part in the situation. 

[myoglobin, ASN, BSN, MSN]

So if I loan someone $500.00 and they sign a contract to pay me 50 percent interest not only would it be unenforceable, but I might face misdemeanor charges of usury. Also, if I hired a  desperate babysitter and promised her $10.00 per hour and training and a work reference but she had to sign a contract to pay me 5k if she left under a year I would be fortunate to not face felony human trafficking or at least civil rights abuse charges. However, a multi billion dollar company that received the largest fine in the history of healthcare and which controls a huge percentage of the market can basically say to new nurses “ sign this contract if you want a job and if you hate the job or we get rid of you, you owe us 10k?”.  Can you also not see how they prey on the weakest and most economically vulnerable RN’s? Sometimes I disagree with those decrying exploitation, but this seems about as clear cut as you can get real Grapes of Wrath level exploitation.

[newnurse2434]

2 hours ago, myoglobin said:

These contracts should be contested on the grounds of “unjust enrichment” rather akin to Wendy’s or Walmart hiring someone for a $10.00 per hour job in a down economy and telling them that if they quit or are terminated they will owe the company thousands. I am a conservative, but if we allow companies to have this sort of power over our lives we will be little more than serfs to corporate America. It’s one thing to pay back a bonus or moving expenses but to for highly trained and licensed professionals to pay for their orientation is truly demeaning. Hopefully nursing unions will oppose this and class action law suits will be brought against HCA. Only public humiliation and negative impact on their stock will deter them from this. Otherwise give it a decade and Walmart will be requiring a similar contract to work in the bakery or to receive valuable customer service training as a greeter.

You took the words right out of my mouth. The orientation and "training" I received was absolutely laughable. I was there for such a short amount of time too that I made probably <$5k from them. They cut corners to come in under budget. Management was pressuring us to clock out by 19:15 though most nights I was there until ~20:00 trying to finish charting or dealing with train wreck patients. I kid you not that one night I got in trouble for clocking out SEVEN MINUTES late because I needed to run a sample down to the lab.

19 hours ago, JadedCPN said:

Did your contract mention specifics about their obligations to you, such as a 5 week preceptorship?

I believe so; however, I need to go back through my contract to see what exactly it says

[JKL33]

2 hours ago, myoglobin said:

Hopefully nursing unions will oppose this and class action law suits will be brought against HCA.

Or anything. Like, you know, our nursing organizations could write some of their "white papers" which actually denounce this ***.

That's exactly the kind of thing that I've been ranting about recently: Why should it have to be labor unions and not our own profession that denounces these things--the profession that purports to hold and uphold innumerable pious ethical standards?

Where are the white papers? Where are the PSAs denouncing this kind of thing? Where are the posts and the tweets and the campaigns? Why can't our organizations and our Schools of Nursing agree that physicians haven't been our biggest problem for a couple of decades now? In fact they have almost nothing to do with our problems?? Someone else is getting rich off of us now. How about we update our agenda and act like it's 2020?

And, even more curiously, what exactly are our organizations afraid of? HCA isn't going to need nurses any more if we dare to have a little self-respect? If we're actually afraid of that then maybe we should stop giving away huge chunks of our "skills" duties to other people so that we can use our RN licenses to click boxes and to work on employers' business projects that put us further in the hole.

 

2 hours ago, myoglobin said:

Walmart will be requiring a similar contract to work in the bakery or to receive valuable customer service training as a greeter.

And paying nurse clinicians $40/hr to pretend to be physicians in a retail clinic.

[newnurse2434]

20 minutes ago, myoglobin said:

So if I loan someone $500.00 and they sign a contract to pay me 50 percent interest not only would it be unenforceable, but I might face misdemeanor charges of usury. Also, if I hired a  desperate babysitter and promised her $10.00 per hour and training and a work reference but she had to sign a contract to pay me 5k if she left under a year I would be fortunate to not face felony human trafficking or at least civil rights abuse charges. However, a multi billion dollar company that received the largest fine in the history of healthcare and which controls a huge percentage of the market can basically say to new nurses “ sign this contract if you want a job and if you hate the job or we get rid of you, you owe us 10k?”.  Can you also not see how they prey on the weakest and most economically vulnerable RN’s? Sometimes I disagree with those decrying exploitation, but this seems about as clear cut as you can get real Grapes of Wrath level exploitation.

Whole heartedly agree that it's exploitation. I don't even know how they'd be able to enforce it because this particular hospital loses nurses at an obscene rate. One day 12 nurses on two separate units all walked out. The turnover rate is so quick throughout the entire hospital that I truly don't know how they can keep up with those who have chosen the mass exodus route. There was maybe 1 or 2 days when I was at work where a nurse *wasn't* threatening to walk out the front door. I'm sure some will look down on me for not sticking it out because I'm a new graduate, but at the same time I won't apologize for walking away from a situation that was so horrifically toxic. I worked at a non profit hospital for several years prior to joining this other hospital, so I knew what good leadership, effective management, and teamwork looked like.

[JKL33]

3 minutes ago, newnurse2434 said:

The turnover rate is so quick throughout the entire hospital that I truly don't know how they can keep up with those who have chosen the mass exodus route.

Because "nursing shortage."

So because of this purportedly massive shortage, our own representative organizations have been complicit in allowing anyone who wants to make a buck to churn out nurses as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

So no one is properly trained; thousands of new, improperly trained nurses are churned out with nothing but debt and an oversold dream, and all of a sudden they need the likes of abusers like HCA.