Hey guys, I am needing some advise regarding to my job.
I graduated in December (2019) and accepted my dream job in Vascular Surgery and Renal Transplant. I have always loved transplants and this particular floor has a transition program into the CVICU (if you get accepted). It sounded perfect because I want to move to critical care eventually but I wanted acute care experience before that jump. I didn't get accepted into the program but you can reapply every 6mths.
So I moved 2hrs away from my hometown and started this new job with not knowing anybody here and being 100% on my own for the first time in my life. At first it was fine, it's a busy floor busy but I get to learn about these cool vascular surgeries and transplants. But then Covid started to hit our area and our floor quickly turned into covid land. All of our old patients are on different floors of the hospital and there is no end in site with being an acute care covid floor. I'm on nights and we are constantly short staffed. Only 1 tech for a 32bed floor and each nurse regularly takes 6-7 patients. Most of us are taking over time to help out when we're short staffed, which is burning us out. Even the nurses with years experience are saying they're overwhelmed and it's never been this bad before. The other night we originally had 6 nurses (which makes for a wonderfully staffed night) but house super pulled 2 of our nurses leaving us with all nurses with under 8mths experience (our team leader had the most experience with 8mths). We ended up having 15 admissions from the ED and it was such a hell night. Thank God nothing crazy happened like a rapid response because I honestly don't know how we could have handled that. That's another thing, once the patient's covid swab results come back negative we a supposed to transfer them off the floor so we are constantly moving patients off and getting new ones. I cant even remember what's going on with half of my patients!
I am so discouraged. I feel like I can't keep up with what's going on at work. We are so busy that I feel like I'm not providing great care. I struggle finding enough time to read up on my patients charts, look at their lab trends, see what old procedures they had. And I still feel new so a lot of these I labs I don't know the significance of and I don't have enough time to sit down and learn the importance of them.
I regularly feel regretful for moving over here for this terrible job. If I would have known this job would have been like this I would have never moved. I just don't know what to do. I only have 6mths experience, but I don't know if I can handle this anymore. I almost always go home crying after my 3/3 stretch of work and dread when I come back. And the today my parents came over to visit and I started crying again when they asked about work. And I'm not an emotional person, I just feel so overwhelmed and upset with the situation I'm in.
I'm really needing advise for this situation. :(
