My unit closed with no warning, am I wrong to feel this way?

[KaroSnowQueen, RN]

Came into work Thursday. Charge nurse grabbed my arm as I walked to the time clock "Clock in but then I have something to say to you". I'm thinking, oh great, what did I do now?

She says they are closing our unit today. Where will we go? What will we do? She isn't sure.

Grab the Adon as she comes off the elevator (notice she didn't come right over and say this is what's going on). She says that the unit will probably close today (Thursday, and it did). That all staff on our unit will BE TREATED AS REGISTRY :redlight: until Wed or Thurs of next week. Which means we can be budgeted out the wazoo as hospital census is waaaaaaaaay down. IF census all over comes up by next Wed or Thurs, then they MAY re-open the unit. If not, then they will shut the unit down completely and work on renovating it entirely and we will all be "temporarily" re-assisgned to another unit until ours is done, estimated 18 weeks, (which means at least four months, most likely more).

One, surely they knew this before Wed. night. We get emails for every sniveling little thing, why couldn't we have been warned about this?

Two, REGISTRY? If I wanted to work registry I would. We are full time staff, who's bright idea was this???

Three, we are all concerned we will cause the other units to be overstaffed, and they will resent us for causing them to be budgeted more than they normally would.

Many of the staff stated they were going to look for other jobs. We had a nurse manager the last year or so[EVIL][/EVIL] who made it clear to us we were her "problem" to be solved, and our morale is in the toilet. Just got, just did get a brand new manager.

A. WHY get a new manager for a unit you are closing down?

B. Did the old manager convince the powers that be that we were a "bad" unit, and convince them to weed us all out by shutting down?

Or are we all just paranoid and this is the way things are?

[UM Review RN, ASN, RN]

Is this legal? After all, you're a full-time employee.

Maybe you can get in touch with the Labor Board and ask them how many hours you have to get per week before they'll let you have a layoff slip or some kind of compensation? And if this switch from fulltime to prn is actually legal.

If this happened to me, I'd have an awful lot of hard thinking to do about what my next move should be.

I wish you the best, and hope you can update us.

[Mandarella]

Happened to me. We worked in the regions cancer center. They just spent millions on the op section, we were inpatient. They started remodeling some of our rooms. Media & community were praising us blah, blah, blah.

I come in to work one day, hallway was dark and patients were gone and there was a sign on the locker room door to report to the 3rd & 4th floor after punching in.

They divided us up among the hospital and said they were "cleaning & doing updates", we would be floated until it was completed. There were lots of "cut days" where there was too much staff, we would get a call @ home or when we showed up they would tell us to go home. Many people started leaving. Our cancer pt's were bunked in with the ortho unit patients. Can you imagine what is was like for both patients? An end stager and a total knee in the same room, etc. We tried to give the private rooms to those people but there are only so many and now with a unit out not alot of room. Not a nice scene.

They never did tell us the truth, as new positions opened up on other floors they made those our "new" homes. About 6 months later they started reconstruction making offices over there and low & behold we merged with another hospital. ????

We were a prominant hosp. Why the merge? Lots of theories but my point is, they STILL won't admit that they had that in the works beforehand.:trout: No chance to protest, no chance for community or staff to voice their mind.

It's been about 7/8 years. Still a sore spot for those of us that were maligned.

[teeituptom, BSN, RN]

unfortunately this happens