guest1039278

I was offered 2 weeks of "shadow shifts" and then was asked to start seeing patients on the second day I was there. ? IDK how you got 5 whole weeks LOL But yeah. Prime's wikipedia page speaks for itself. You might have made a license-saving choice by turning down the job there.

Good for you. I would also sue the place into the ground. I can just imagine myself on the ground turning blue from an asthma exacerbation while my coworkers and the DON look down on me and accuse me of trying to get out of work and not being a team player. People who condone this kind of weird crap are absolutely outside of their mind.

"Am I a joke to you?" -My Albuterol rescue inhaler for asthma

IMHO: Report it immediately.

Um.... not to be dramatic but uh.... Did you just win the lottery? ? But seriously: 1. Not a "familiar" scenario to me. Never heard of having to force a hospital staff member to be exposed to cigarette smoker because the patients want to go smoke. 2. Cigarette smoke is an occupational hazard to everyone, even if you don't have asthma. After they are done smoking, the smoke particulates are on everything including clothes and can still cause reactions in people who are sensitive. 3. You have rights as a worker, regardless of the occupation. If I was ever disciplined by an employer by something like this, I would be laughing my way to my state's equal rights commission office, the board, employment attorney's office, etc. Honestly, this is absolutely hilarious and I know it's not the nicest thing to say but this sounds so bizarre and out-of-pocket that I can't help but laugh. 4. If there is any provable bullying, retaliation, etc against you associated with your refusal to purposefully expose yourself to cigarette smoke when it is 100% within the facility's ability to avoid such an event, then this kind of thing could bring the whole facility to a stop on a dime. I have seen C-Suite level people get canned over far less. Way less. 5. Joint commission, boards, OSHA, IDK even know how many others would just be foaming at the mouth after hearing about this ? Because you refused to do this, they should put your picture on a billboard with the caption "Some heroes don't wear capes." ? The bar could not be lower for your facility holy hell.

As someone who worked their entire career in a state that did not have formal nurse:patient ratio laws, I can say that if your state does not have formal limits in place in terms of number of patients per nurse, you won't have that to fall back on. I have seen ICU nurses get 3 patients, all super high acuity and intubated with a crap ton of drips running, and not really anything they can do about it. One time they tried to give me 1:9 when I was on medsurg (fortunately this did not happen). The hospital can write you up for whatever it wants to, and unless there is a formal law in place that says this is beyond the scope and/or safety of your defined role or it's a limitation specific in your own contract, it's gonna be a harder hill to climb to put up a defense for it. I am not saying it's right, but in states that do have these protective laws, the conversation ends SO much faster if you catch my drift. Honestly, this is morbid advice I got, but a valuable insight I was told by someone was always check the assignment before you clock in. If you don't clock in, you then see your assignment, you now have time to make a quick choice as to whether you decide to quit and give a 5 minute notice, or keep going. I honestly don't know if this steadfast, but this person who told me this is experienced in facility-based leadership. According to this individual, 2 week notices are a courtesy, and while a 5 minute notice is not so much of a courtesy, a 5 minute notice is different than clocking in and quitting "on the clock" where the words 'abandonment' may actually carry some real weight to them. Will you get blacklisted and maybe even a bad review? Will you be hesitant to include that facility on your job history in case they are contacted by any future employer? Maybe. Maybe more stuff too. But for the hospital to argue that you genuinely committed to work that shift and then later committed 'abandonment' (when you otherwise never clocked in and ultimately came to your workplace at a very inconvenient time wearing clothing you happened to have next to your bed that morning so you could turn in your badge to the day charge nurse and send a resignation email/text after you leave, your reasons for doing so aside) would be much easier to do if you actually clocked in. Again, it's absolutely sad as hell we have to talk about this stuff, but this is our industry now. There are people out there may have pissed off former employers to no end for not bending over backwards to accommodate the suits-wearers, but at least they still have RN after their name. Again, IDK if this is something that is steadfast, but according to this mentor of mine, you do what you gotta do to put distance between your license and the chopping block, even if pisses people off.

If charged with theft and adjudicated as guilty, doesn't that end up going back to the BON anyway? I imagine that you would have to report that kind of conviction.

Yeah. I have seen people get write-ups about things like this when it's like one tablet, but a whole blister pack could be 200-300 dollars or even more (which is likely) which would likely be perceived as "stolen." The pharmacy board will likely have objections as the diversion is of prescription-only medicine (and again, quantity is gonna be an issue here). Pharmacy staff/dept at the hospital will likely be *** as if nobody came forward on this, pharmacy would potentially eat the cost of the missing meds and some poor pharmacy tech might be accused to stealing the medicine themselves. Lastly, and I would hate to think of this, but let's be honest. Depending on how pissed the hospital is, you have to think of it like taking expensive equipment or supplies. This isn't accidentally taking home a handful of alcohol swabs. If you "steal" hundreds of dollars worth of prescription medicine from the hospital for what is admitted to as "personal use," that could be something the hospital might refer to law enforcement about. There are so many cans of worms that might open up on this issue. OP absolutely needs to get an attorney ASAP. She still needs a lawyer.

"Trivial" might mean something different to you than me, it seems. An entire blister pack of zofran ODTs worth $300 or more isn't "trivial" like a handful of alcohol swabs or a personal-sized bottle of Purell. It may go farther than simply "ethics" violations. "Stealing" hundreds of dollars of prescription medications for what was admitted as personal use is potentially more than just "ethics" unfortunately. Regardless, as I don't know if the BON will even look into it or make recommendations to other agencies, but there are multiple negative ways to look at this that are reasonably valid and thusly OP absolutely needs to get an attorney to help them immediately.

I used to be a pharmacy tech back in the day. Ondansetron ODTs are not necessarily cheap. We typically don't think about it on our own as if we get it from a pharmacy, it may go through insurance, discount with the store's membership, etc. Uninsured patients would routinely get upset by the cash price of the ODTs. The NIH has published multiple articles about this issue. For instance, of an ODT tab cash price is $20 (depending on the pharmacy this would be a "conservative" number IMO, sadly). If you take a blister pack of these ODTs (10 total), that's $200 worth of prescription-only medicine you have diverted from the facility (and by virtue of prescription-only and it not being prescribed to you, that is not good). Not a controlled substance issue, sure, but technically if you take $200 worth of prescription medicine from a hospital or pharmacy for "personal use," it is a problem that the board will not necessarily just brush off. The nursing board is still obligated to do their part to appease the pharmacy board too.

I used to work at a Prime facility and I can firmly say I do NOT recommend it. Hilariously, the wikipedia page for Prime is not very flattering.

Not nearly enough info here to understand what's going on. Also, why would "anyone" need to call your therapist for you? Like as in your coworkers need to call your therapist? I am at a loss as to why you have this expectation.

I am not disagreeing with you. I am not sure what the confusion is, if any.

I wonder about that. I am not so sure philosophy instruction is as standardized as mathematics.

I agree with what you are saying to 99%. My spidey-sense is about that last 1%: is this just about patient care, or is this also about the physical handling of the meds?

This is just too weird for AN. There's no question being asked, and it sounds like a flight-of-ideas if I have ever seen it. What does replacing hairstylists with AI-controlled robots have to do with the nursing profession? Now this is interesting. Where did you go to school where philosophy was an alternative to algebra? ? That's funny. I too would have chosen algebra.

I had a similar thought. It is weird that staff nurses have this extra work. The staff nurse's participation in data collection sounds like a double edged sword. Will the results of your audits be compared against your own performance? Are you inadvertently building cases against coworkers? Why is the auditor not independent of the department being audited? What specifically is the goal? Improving pain outcomes or identifying medication misuse amongst staff? QI regarding patient care seems okay but becoming an unwitting investigator to quell whatever suspicions the organization has about the department is a very tricky scenario. This doesn't sound like pressure injury, CAUTI, fall type of strictly QI. I am wondering how much more to the story there is. Questionable, especially if the auditors are not independent of the department being audited.

Men in nursing is dope and the male nurses I know are absolutely fantastic. Who cares what haters think?

What do you mean by "indiscriminately?" Just because a female patient isn't about to die, you can still make physical contact with the patient to do an assessment, get vitals, perform routine procedures, etc. It doesn't need to be urgent/emergent to be considered medically necessary. In Muslim countries, do male doctors still touch female patients even if it's not strictly a medical emergency? It's still medically "necessary" to perform exams and procedures in non-emergent situations.

Who cares? Be you. The most unorthodox thing I saw in another nurse was their zealous interest in being a "furry." Not at work, obviously, but outside work that was his jam. Full suit and conventions and everything. Guess what. Still a good nurse and a nice guy. Who cares?

Same way a male doctor would examine a female patient. Use professional and courteous language. Get a chaperone. I wouldn't think too hard about it. I know I don't, and I follow my simple rules with no issues.

Not sure what being a guy has to do with anything. Your post just seems like a diatribe about your discontent with your job. Men in nursing is a win in my book.

Aren't CS medication counts supposed to be a 2 RN check? Did your facility expect you to do this on your own? I haven't seen RN med counts in a long time since the implementation of medication dispensing machines like Pixis.

Maybe I am just an idiot, but from what I gathered, the patient had 10/10 pain and a PRN morphine order which you implemented. I truly do not see what the problem is. Being on hospice does not change how 10/10 pain is supposed to be interpreted.

It took me 2 years before I truly felt confident. It took me 1 year before I felt like I could competently do "nurse stuff." I remember driving to work about a year into my first job and thinking to myself, "I think I finally get it. Maybe I can actually handle today." If you, at 9 months into your first job, are expecting to be at the level of comfort compared to multi-year experienced nurses, I would recommend reconsidering that expectation. "Time-management" skills is a fancy term people use in an attempt to universally explain the struggles of new grads. It's mostly BS. EXPERIENCE. You'll get there. But experience is not accelerated with everyone echoing the phrase "time-management skills."