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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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 wa...

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 requir...

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 emplo...

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 i...

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...

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...

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

You did aggressive follow-up with both the resident and his physician. Your actions were appropriate. As long as you documented your interventions and the Physician's responses, all should be good. No reasonable nurse should object to what you did. W...

Unfortunately, Oklahoma, with the blessing of our then-governor, passed the right-to-work law in a landslide. The governor proclaimed, "Oklahoma is OPEN FOR BUSINESS!" Yeah, maybe for minimum-wage jobs like Wal-Mart associate. Whatever. This is also ...

I wonder how this journalist would feel about the idea of "protecting their jobs" if the L.A. Times falls victim, as so many print publications have, to the ready, if somewhat questionable, supply of information that the Internet provides? Will he gr...

A-MEN! No California nurse would accept the working conditions common in Oklahoma facilities!

Ugh... used to constantly dig food scraps, even whole food out of several morbidly obese, elderly NH patients' crevices and bedding who had habits of hoarding snacks. Another gross patient I had was a 91-year-old lady who dipped snuff and spat or dro...

I've taken the Hep B series once, and have refused it at all subsequent hire-ons. I only accepted one flu vaccine, and I was so ill for 3 days (and wasn't allowed to be off work) that I absolutely refuse to take another flu shot.

In my area, LPNs have generally worked in LTC; they are a rarity in hospitals. This has been the case for years, and is not particular to the current economic recession. I haven't heard anything about nurses being laid off here, whether LPN or RN. I...

Wear a gown when you're cleaning up a resident with Alzheimers who is having a bad case of the runs. I learned this when I first became a CNA, nearly 10 years ago. Took me a half-hour to get my resident cleaned up and settled down for sleep. I steppe...

I've had a few fingersticks that just "went" everywhere myself. You'd never figure you might need a face shield for a capillary stick, eh?

I don't know how secure the jobs are, given the recent hospital and unit closings in certain cities, and in some areas, such as many Northeastern cities, there's a glut of nurses who can't find jobs already. In more stressful areas of nursing, like s...