Published Jul 31, 2014
rumwynnieRN
272 Posts
At my last facility, I worked on a med/surg floor for almost a year. I moved because my husband is getting out of the Air Force, and we planned to move to his hometown. I moved ahead. I landed a job at the type of facility I wanted to work in after nursing school.
Just when I was starting to get the hang of everything at my previous facility, even though this hospital also uses EPIC (although an older one), I just feel like I'm always stumbling. It's almost like I have to unlearn 70% of what I did before to go back to what I did in nursing school (I work at a Level 1 Trauma center now, and even paging the residents and the other doctors, I feel dumb). When I did what I was taught in nursing school at my previous facility, I was told, in some shape or form, not to do that (I was dinged for over-charting), but now my previous habit for "over-charting" is the norm.
Now that I'm starting to get my time management for my new facility under control, some things I would've paid attention to I neglected (like your basic nursing stuff) because I was so focussed on making sure I got everything else done.
My coworkers have said that I will get my "sync" back, and that some of them have been there (they switched floors or left the facility and came back).
So how do you adjust? While this is my third facility, at my second facility, I went through a new grad residency, which helped a lot. When orientation is only a week or two, how do you get your nursing-time management back to where it's supposed to be? I still do my checklist/time table thing, but how long does it take before you adjust to the facilities policies and balance everything? There are times when I feel really overwhelmed.