I've just accepted a job at the state impatient psych facility and I'm very nervous about it!! I've always had an interest in psych. Upon graduating in May, I was offered a home health/mental health psych job but turned it down because I was nervous about going to these pts houses alone as a new grad...so I started a job on a cardiac stepdown working nights/weekends...needless to say I hate it! I hate that I can't carry on a conversation without my phone ringing. I'm totally not interested at all in cardiac and while the pay is amazing-the schedule sucks!
So still keeping psych in mind I decided to apply to our state hospital and I got a job offer. The pay is amazing and the shift is awesome 7-3, alternating weekends! They want me to start orientation beginning in January. I'm not really afraid of psych pts. I really enjoyed my clinicals and I know that most psych pts arnt as violent as people make them out to be, but my job offer is for the Forensics program so they'll be coming from the CJ system. I'm not really sure if that matters. When asked about safety, the interviewers talked about training in deescalation techniques and stuff. But I can't help but wonder why they would offer me (an inexperienced nurse) such great pay and a great schedule.
They say the minimum nurse to unit ratio is 3 with the RN (me) charging. I guess I don't really have any specific questions about it but I'm hoping if anyone has had any advice or good/bad experiences they'd like to share, I'd appreciate it. I guess my fear of the unknown/safety issues is making me hesitant about it.
So far it's been great! Turns out I was wrong about the ratio. I learned that there are only three nurses per unit with 6 techs. So our core is 9. And there are 40 residents on the unit. We can have more than 3 nurses but if another unit is short, then that fourth nurse will get pulled.
Anyways, there is a lot of paperwork I have to learn how to do. It's a hybrid system so a lot of handwriting too.
Most of the residents are very nice. Only a handful get aggressive. For the most part it's pretty stable. Usually when it's not is when we get an admission where the individual has been off their meds and they're aggressive...which was just recently. I haven't had to deal with a crisis yet. That's really one thing I'm still nervous about!
Apparently we are one of the more stable units. The residents are there longer so they're more stable. Unlike some of the adult mental health units where they are constantly getting admissions and filling out critical incident reports.
anjunah
13 Posts
I'm curious to know how your first week went! :)