Charge nurse has it out for me...kind of a rant

Nurses Relations

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i swear, this is this ONE charge nurse in particular that has it out for me. Really bad. I'll have been on this floor as an RN for a year on July 1st. And every time i work a night shift with her, she gives me hell. She is only a night shifter...im a 12 hour day/night rotation. On day shift we have the max of 4 patients per nurse. on night shift we usually have about 5-6 patients per nurse, depending on acuity.

So last night she decided it would be really fun to give me EIGHT PATIENTS!!! yes...8! And why?? because "Nurse ____ has a sore back and needs to be able to sit down" So instead of giving Nurse _______ 6 patients, she gives her 3 patients. Oh, and all three were super super quiet.

What do i get?????? Two elderly men with dementia who are obsessed with their bowels, a detox who has bugs crawling in his "lady parts", a fresh open heart, a palliative care patient, two COPD, and patient who had out of hospital cardiac arrest who had hypothermic treatment AND LIVED! (He was freaking me out all night with his telemetry strips. kept having runs of VTach that would subside)

What does nurse______ get? A patient going for a cardiac cauterization the next day,A heart failure who would be going home in the morning and the other one i'm not sure.

So charge nurse decides to chew my a$$ a new one because i was late entering my telemetry strips. She gave me a crazy hectic load of patients, she knew i was busy and instead of asking if i need help all she can do is yell at me about things i didnt get done or things i am behind on.

Not to mention last time i worked with her (couple nights ago) she said it loud enough so i could hear "I think it's a mistake to hire new grads on this floor. they just don't fit in. we are all so close here, why add a new grad to the mix?"

I am so annoyed and sick of working with her. I feel like she is purposely trying to get me to screw up so i get fired or something.

Any suggestions on what to do with a charge nurse like this?? I'm afraid to go to manager because my manager loves this nurse and i'm the "newbie"

You are not overreacting!

But you have to react!

The situation the charge nurse put you in is dangerous. Dangerous to your patients and dangerous for you. Definitely go over her head and over the managers if need be.

Write an incident report. Write down exactly what happened that night. Do it fact based only - a completely unemotional report. If you're a member of a union it might be good to notify them to. In our union, there are really good people who know how to deal with such issues correct. This is a case of harassment which is endangering patients lives. I do not want to scare you, but if anything had happened to any of your patients - who do you think would go to court? Not the charge nurse.

If it were me I would openly confront her and just go ballistic, nothing puts someone like that in their place then when you go crazy. She won't know what hit her! Also threaten incident reporting, going to the nurse manager- all of that. You know what she's doing is illegal and immoral and unethical so what do you have to lose?

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