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It's rough a lot of days. It doesn't seem like it would be as fast as acute care, but it is. You are right, the patient/nurse ratios are much higher; you are much more dependent upon UAP due to the sheer volume of patient care. In my area, one nurse is typically in charge of 20-30 residents as well as the UAPs taking care of them. You need to be on top of your game in a different way than in a hospital - you don't have the resources or personnel available in most hospitals when you work at a nursing home. Sometimes the pace can become incredibly frenetic. Pros: yes, you do get to know your residents over time compared to the in-and-out care of a hospital. Also, you're much more autonomous. The physician is generally only available by phone and comes in 1x a week for a few hours. And if you're an RN, you probably have a better shot at supervisory/administrative positions at a NH than at a hospital; even ADNs have a fair chance at DON jobs, depending on experience and what the competition has to offer.

I broke down and got unlimited texting. I do wish that cell phone companies would make texting optional instead of an always-active feature that cannot be turned off or refused though. The 15c/message deal is a racket.

In most jobs, breaks, let alone meals, were a luxury. If I did sit down for a meal, 9 times out of ten an admin nurse or a CNA would be dragging me back to the floor. We weren't allowed to leave for lunch. The same admin nurses would routinely leave for hour-long lunches at good restaurants. I regularly got the old "time management" spiel when I protested. I live and work in a Right-to-Work state which is one of the most union-hostile in the United States. In my current job, which is not in a hospital or LTC, we're mandated to take breaks and will get in trouble if we don't take them, partly due to the fact that overtime is a big no-no here.

Any of my professors (I'm working on my B.A. in English) who caught a student texting in class would have a cow - "See me after class" with a threat that if it happens again, the student will be flunked for the semester. A lot of colleges are banning notebook computers in class because students use them to check their Facebook or MySpace pages. I used to use my notebook to take notes in MS Word. Plus, in Thailand and a few other countries in Asia, it is illegal to use cell phones to cheat on exams. It's prosecuted as computer fraud. Several students went to jail at a Thai university some years back for setting up an elaborate system to cheat on exams via cell phone. I took 10-stroke typing in junior high years ago, and it stuck with me. I can type 50 wpm blind.

Given the horrible limitations of the cell-phone keypad, I can understand why people who text use "texting language." What I never got was the appeal of texting itself. I'm an old dinosaur and need the full QWERTY keyboard to express myself on screen. Plus, the whole 15 cents a message to send AND receive a text message, whether you want it or not, kind of killed any enthusiasm I had for texting... especially after my wife's 15 y/o daughter ran up a $650 cell-phone bill for texting.

Ah, but anyone can spell anything correctly nowadays by Googling it... provided it's something professionally written. I double-checked it. Bragging on it and then spelling it wrong would make me look quite the fool... Although, I must confess - I was a spelling bee champion in the halcyon days of yore....

Heh... my medical director was impressed because I was the first person he'd ever seen that wasn't a physician who was able to correctly pronounce "Creutzfeldt-Jakob". "Dulcolax", oddly, is frequently mispronounced around here.

Generally, CNA and CMA certification mandate x number of minimum hours of training at a state-approved CNA/CMA training program. As far as I know, no state allows a person to become certified until they are documented to have completed all the required training, under any circumstances. Getting a CNA/CMA may give you an idea of some of the fundamentals of patient care, and may help you decide whether you want to continue on in becoming a licensed nurse. However, CNAs are very limited in scope of practice. They are oriented towards basic patient care tasks such as feeding, hygiene, and vital signs. They are not allowed to act on situations that require nursing judgement, and MUST report these situations to the charge nurse for follow-up. That said, an observant CNA can be an real asset to a nurse. Notably, certain nursing programs may count your experience as an Army medic towards your nursing program, or at the very least, your experience may improve your chances of being admitted into a program.

In the history books, this was called "indentured servitude" and "bonded" employment (hence the term "bondage"), and amounted to slavery, since the wages indentured workers earned were always insufficient to pay back whatever loan or "bond" the employer held. These foreign workers are being exploited as well. Henry Ford understood that putting Americans to work would create a built-in customer base for products. Once Americans stop buying products, who will buy them instead? Ther

My own contribution to this is: I live in the lower Midwest. We don't have blizzards here, very rarely does snow get more than an inch when it does fall, because the climate is too warm for blizzards. Our climate is too warm for full blizzards, but instead it causes ice storms consisting of freezing rain, which forms a casing of ice on anything it hits - the roads, trees, power lines, etc, and turns the roads into black ice, making any expedition dangerous. Cross-country skiing is not an option here. Nurses are expected to literally risk getting themselves killed on the roads or getting their cars totalled to get to work.

this kind of stuff is why i'm glad i got out of hospital/nursing home care. it's nice to go back to work in a job that closes during ugly weather.

"Only" a month? The only job where I spent more than a WEEK in training was my current job at a plasma center, where you have to do every task in the view of a trainer x number of times and jump through all kinds of hoops. In regular jobs, three days, tops, and you were on your own.

In the US, you're lucky if you get paid leave at all. The FMLA only protects you from getting fired for taking maternity leave. Most employers here would prefer for women to squat in the bathroom, have their baby, send them home with a relative, then go right back to work...

Bottles of those "pills" Hallmark sells (really jelly beans.) Flinstones Chewable Morphine....

They could like this site to Digg and have people rate comments that way....:chuckle:chuckle