Hello everyone. I am just looking to vent. I am a newer nurse. Been on my job for 8 months and off of orientation for 5 months. I work on a very busy ortho/surgical floor. We tend to get a lot of nursing home patients, as well. So, some of these patients tend to be admitted for placement, multiple wounds, infections, etc. I am getting a little worn down with the assignments that I have been getting lately. My unit does not do well with assigning per acuity. Rather they assign by grouping the rooms together. So I tend to get a lot of the isolation patients. The other night I had 6 patients, 3 in contact iso, 2 had telesitters, a CBI, and a hip fracture. Of those 6 patients, 4 were complete care patients and my floor only had 1 aide for 32 patients. This tends to be the norm. I have talked to my manager, she said it is unfair and she will look into it. However, this has been an ongoing issue on my unit that never gets resolved. The other issue I am having is that 1) I work nights 2)I am a mother of 2 kids 3) I am becoming depressed, tired all the time, and am regretting becoming a nurse. The worst part of all is I try to vent to my husband and he just doesnt get it. He has no idea. He tells me, "Well, you only work4 days a week." Or he explains how much harder his job is than mine. My unit is always short nurses. They tend to float nurses from my floor to transfer to other units to cover their shortage. Therfore, leaving us short and at least once or twice a week I am told I may get mandated to work the day shift. I am just tired and frustrated. I am tired of working for an organization where it feels that they do not care about their nurses. It seems like management is always looking for ways to get the nurses in trouble for something and God forbid you ask a queation about something. We are a Magnet hospital, I thought they were supposed to be nursing oriented. Man was I wrong.
Just wanted to say I can totally relate to the patient assignment thing. There were so many times at my previous job (ICU) where a nurse would have 2 incredibly sick and very busy patients, while another would have 2 that required much less hands on care, all because of the room numbers. It was all about the room numbers! I never could understand what the big deal was....I really don't mind walking a few extra feet between my assigned rooms if it means the workload is more evenly distributed so as to not overwhelm any one person. I know in a critical care setting, you don't want to give any one nurse 2 patients on opposite sides/ends of the unit, but come on! Where I work now does a much better job of factoring patient acuity into our assignments.
CCRN2BE
60 Posts
Just wanted to say I can totally relate to the patient assignment thing. There were so many times at my previous job (ICU) where a nurse would have 2 incredibly sick and very busy patients, while another would have 2 that required much less hands on care, all because of the room numbers. It was all about the room numbers! I never could understand what the big deal was....I really don't mind walking a few extra feet between my assigned rooms if it means the workload is more evenly distributed so as to not overwhelm any one person. I know in a critical care setting, you don't want to give any one nurse 2 patients on opposite sides/ends of the unit, but come on! Where I work now does a much better job of factoring patient acuity into our assignments.