On call

I think you need to carefully read through HR policies and reach out to HR directly. I'm not certain that your employer is allowed to manipulate your hours in this way. If you are on call, you need to be given on call pay, at the very least. It also seems like your floor has really poor planning and allocation of resources. I think you're on the right track applying for other jobs.

I work on a ortho/surgical floor. Recently Medicaid/Medicare implemented post op day 1 discharged for all ortho surgicals. There is now a rapid turn over of patients on the floor. Typical ratio is 1:5 discharge average is 3 and then get 2-3 new surgicals. Since implementation hours have gotten tight. I'm not talking about overtime but most times not even getting the fulltime hours that I was hired for. Sometimes getting put on call in the AM everyday that I work in order to be called in when surgicals start coming to the floor. I have lost on average of 4-12 hours a week because of this. To me this is a lot of money to lose from a 72hour pay period. This also doesn't factor in the cost for me to have to still take my child to daycare on the days that I am on call. Not to mention the schedule incudes every third weekend which you 95% of the time will be called off because there is no patients. That is an additional 12-24 hours lost a month. In place of these hours we are required to use PTO. Going to start applying to new jobs this week. Pretty disappointed because I really enjoyed my job. It's just gotten too unstable and it's hard to pick up extra shifts around the ones I get called off of in order to make up the hours lost. I have already tried this as I scheduled for 6 12's in one week and was called off on all but two of them! Anyone else deal with this issue? How did you handle it? Worse part is they are continuing to hire for my floor!

I've experienced this at each of my three nursing jobs so far. We are either very understaffed, or very overstaffed. I don't do call, though. I'm either working, or I'm not. Being canceled has never been a hardship for me, so I suppose I'm lucky in that way.

I would agree to look at the HR policy on this one. One placed I work would downstaff a nurse for 4 hours if census was low. Coming up to the 4 hour mark, staffing was reassessed based on staffing. If still low, that nurse would be called off for another 4 hours (often, at that point, for the rest of his/her shift). If census was back up, the nurse was called in. That nurse wasn't really "on call" (and did not get call pay)...it is just they had been downstaffed for part of the shift, but still might have to work the balance of their scheduled shift.

It never occurred often enough that anyone lost too much time or was forced to take more PTO than they wanted (and people had the option to not take PTO if they so choose).

I worked on a ortho med surge floor. We had the same problem. First summer I was there I used all of my pto just to pay bills. I ended up transferring to the telemetry step down unit. Haven't been called off since. But now my hospital is upset they can't keep my old unit open on the weekends because no one wants to work there in part due to constantly being called off.

This would work much better. The problem is I live an hour drive from my work. Also, if you get called in you are suppose to be there within 30 minutes. I've told them numerous times I cannot do call. Either call me off or use me somewhere. It eats up my day because I still have to take my child to daycare and drive the hour to work and sit and wait for them to call me in or sometimes wait until two hours before my shift ends for them to call me and tell me they don't need me. I've told them my valid reasons for being unable to do call because of daycare and such.