Nursing cutbacks

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How's your hospital/city/ state doing?

Are you seeing layoffs, cutbacks, being sent home early either unpaid or by using your vacation pay?

I'm in the northeast and some of the hospital near me including the one I work at are starting to send peopel home when the census is low and are having hiring freezes.

Specializes in ICU/CCU.

I work in the SF Bay Area. I don't see travelers on my unit anymore, and our per diem nurses are no longer scheduled in advance. We have a "no cancel" policy in our contract, but staffing has been calling us to ask whether we'd be interested in taking a leave of absence or vacation day when the census is low. A lot of our support staff have been cut. We are not filling empty RN positions; instead management has eliminated them. Our unit hasn't hired a new grad in almost 2 years. We regularly run out of supplies now because management is under stocking to prevent waste and save money. I'm more than a little scared because I was one of the last hired to my unit, so if we start lay offs I'll be in the first wave to go. I feel very lucky to have a job right now. I do not envy the '09 nursing school graduates.

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Specializes in ICU.

I'm in Houston Texas, and there are no lay offs here. No cut backs as far as I know of.

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Specializes in Psych.

It's not good in Northern NJ. I hear that NYC still needs nurses, but everywhere else around here is a problem. We regularly get called off (3 or 4 nurses a shift for a 48 bed Medical unit). This started in the summer. The hospital laid off non-nurses but they are going to have to lay off nurses soon, they are just overstaffed for the census. You can't keep calling off this many nurses every single day. They told us that we are job-sharing instead of being laid off. I was hired in 2007 and boy, am I glad I am not a new hire now. My fear is that I'll be bumped back to night shift, which was really hard on me.

ETA: Oh, and the state psych hospital where I work per-diem is the opposite -- plenty of patients (of course), plenty of work. But there is a hiring freeze.

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Specializes in Med-Surg.

Right now we're "in season" here in central west coast of Florida and are busy. Some of us are getting overtime, but positions are being filled readily and we rarely are short staffed unless someone calls off. I think by off season this summer we'll be fully staffed and won't be hiring, which might be tough for the grads starting to come out of school in May.

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Specializes in Med Surg/Tele/ER.

I'm in Ky & we did have a hiring freeze earlier....no nurses have been laid off, but there is a lot of low census. We have not seen this in the ER.

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Specializes in ortho/neuro/ob/nicu.

I just hate that we had to use PTO hours when we were called off. We finally persuaded HR to let us choose if we want to use PTO or not get paid. The difference for me between 60 hours and 72 is only about $70, so I am hanging on to my pto; I really think we need vacation time

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