I have to ask myself more and more, is it really THIS bad every where? I have stayed with the same employer through the pandemic though have changed jobs twice within the organization. That speaks to how long the pandemic has raged on as by union contract we have to stay in a position 6 months before we can apply for another. Part of why I have stayed is that it is a rural area and there are few options. I briefly explored returning to hospice, but they did a bait and switch on the job I applied for and seemed to think by limiting me to one offered position that I would just accept it. No.
My hospital employer has really piled on the stress at work. Short staffed in the pandemic, they expected us to come in on our days off (or work from home) on preparing for a transition to Epic. Not everyone learns well in a self guided online situation. Requests for an option to have a classroom option where ignored. Requests to have be given classroom time during regular working hours was ignored.
The switch over to Epic happened with extra support on hand for two weeks, but there was no one in admin or management prepared to anticipate all the workflow changes that would come up. Still silent. No one speaks to anything except billing codes. The big concern is the patients be in the right bed charge code at 2300, though only case managers can change it... and they aren't working at 2300. The second big thing was charge capture for nursing procedures. Whatever.
The same week that we switched to Epic, they changed food service providers. I don't know how it all went down, but now the food service portion of the hospital has less than half the employees they did previously. Some meals are coming up in takeout continuers and the patients receive cold food. No one is picking up dirty trays when trays are used. They just stack up on the unit. There is no one refilling cups and lids in the unit pantries. Or there are cups and lids that don't match. There is irregular stocking of juice, pudding, etc. We don't always have applesauce or pudding for patient medication passes. We don't have juice when someone's blood sugar bottoms out. And for goodness sakes sometimes there is no coffee!
And not a word. Not a word from managers or admin to acknowledge the chaos. In the early days of the pandemic they tried to make a big change in unit functions for one of the med-surg floors based on customer feedback. It was a disaster and led to many of the experienced nurses leaving for other units. Now we have patients leave AMA because of breakfast not coming until after 10am. How in the hell did we get here? Then they changed the name of the unit I work on in the computer so they could expand the kinds of patients that could be bed boarded there. They did not tell anyone about the new name. That led to no food being delivered because the kitchen just assumed our unit was closed again (as had happened in the past), and had environmental services searching the hospital for the new mystery room numbers.
We still have covid cases in this county that keeps us in one of those purple tiers. Our numbers of hospitalized Covid patients have finally dropped below 20 a day. I am grateful we never had to make use of lounges or lobbies to house patients, but could administration be more blind to the consequences of their actions?
Administration must be getting bonuses for some of this stuff, as they do not care what the down stream effects are. Who are these people? Would they want their loved ones to have cold food in the hospital? Or no food? Bizarre. We just received the invitation to do the quarterly survey on work place satisfaction. Not sure that admin will be pleased to to see those results. Can it affect their bonuses and thus future decisions? Who knows?!?!
I will give it a few more months, but I will also start preparing to move out of this area. Hard to know where to go. What are the questions to ask before taking a job? Believe it when I say, I will be interviewing them more than they will be interviewing me.
