chickapin

Notice how I did mention that it depends on the patient's condition? Of course I have no problem kicking people out if I think it benefits my patient and I have no problem sending people home if they're being too loud, have too many people in the room, etc. But it can also benefit some patients by letting people stay a bit longer. I'm not always talking about overnight, or even till 10. My concern is more about people who never, ever bend the rules despite extenuating circumstances. Even with healthy postpartum patients who've only been delivered for a few hours, I've seen new grandparents turned away at the unit door at 8:15 after flying in to the area as fast as they could. I just don't think stuff like that is necessary.

I'm a new RN on an OB floor - postpartum and antepartum. All the postpartum patients are in private rooms. AP usually is private unless we are full then we will start to double them up. Our visiting hours last til 8PM...some people are strict enforcers of this and it really bothers me for some reason. I let my patients know that they officially end at 8 but as long as their visitors are quiet, I don't mind if they stay later. They are also allowed to have one person spend the night. We have some nurses who will refuse to let people's family come up after 8 and make the baby's dad go say hi in the lobby. Totally unneccessary and awful for our customer service scores. Anyway, so I had one patient recently who experienced the loss of one of her twins, the other was in the NICU (28 weeks). She wanted to have two people spend the night (mother from out of town and husband). I did not have a problem with this, though when I gave report to the night nurse @ 11, she totally had a cow. Absolutely no way could we break protocol and let her have 2 people spend the night in her private room, even though one of her babies had died. Policy says 1 person and that is it, she tells me. I guess I just don't get why some people are so strict about this and how she could be so callous about it. This patient had no meds but PRN for pain...fully ambulatory, no foley, no IV, etc. She just needed her family. I ended up calling the nursing supervisor who said it was fine of course, so then that nurse was ok with it too...She needed permission? Are we really supposed to get permission to do things like this for our patients? I guess I see the policy as more of guideline that we can interpret depending on the condition and needs of our patients, and not a set-in-stone, black and white kind of thing. Any thoughts?

I started at the end of January at $22 as a new grad. Got my first raise (promoted to RN-1) and now I am at $24.64.

lol. i am like 26 hours post-nclex right now (75 questions) and i too find myself staring at "your exam results are not available at this time." over and over again, all day long, i go back to the pearson site!! eventually i will go and they'll be available!

OMG now I understand how it feels!! I took it this morning and it stopped at 75. I was hoping it would but still it's awful when it finally does stop. When I was at 74 my heart started pounding. I swear my HR increased at least 20 BPM! I only had 1 calculation question. I had at least 10-12 select all that apply and I hate them. Then I had a ton of teaching questions. No delegation, just a few "a nurse is floating to a different unit" questions. A bunch of drugs, some of which I had never heard of. Now I obsessively log into the Pearson site like hourly to see if for some crazy reason, the quick results are available sooner than in 2 business days.

Hi guys! I started orienting as a GN on my unit on Monday. :w00t:I had been a unit secretary for almost 3 years on a busy postpartum/antepartum unit. When I started my BSN program I was almost positive I wanted to do peds, most likely NICU. Then in school I really liked the ED. So I did my preceptorship in the ED at a children's hospital. But that made me realize that as much as I loved working with kids, it was too hard for me to see the really sick/injured ones. So in the end, after a ton of consideration, I decided to stay and work on my unit that I've been on all along! Everyone is just so wonderful and they're all very happy for me. I did a 12 hr shift on Monday doing antepartum and learned a ton and had a lot of fun. It went by so fast. Tuesday I did postpartum and did some baby assessments. It's so much better than nursing school!! And I'm getting paid! I am so happy with my decision to stay. It's a really good unit with a great team and usually good staffing. I still have a ton to learn but I think it's going to be really great. NCLEX on Monday!

I got my ATT on Monday so I'm signed up for the NCLEX on the 28th. I was very lucky to get that appointment, I think someone rescheduled theirs as I was looking at the times. I don't have my eligibility letter yet that says I can work as a GN though. So I'm just a unit secretary w/ a BSN until then! I'm really hoping it comes by Friday...I'm in Florida...does anyone know if that is something that comes via email like the ATT or is that a snail mail letter that comes from the BON? My manager said it usually comes a few days apart from the ATT...I just don't know what to be looking out for!

I'm taking it the 28th, and I've not started studying yet either. I feel like my school prepared me well. I got 99.99% on all but 2 of my HESI's (and the other 2 were 92% and 96%). My school made us do the Kaplan online program in order to graduate so I did a lot of questions then. I plan on reviewing some stuff soon but I've never been the person to study for hours a day, everyday.

Hey. I remember rushing to try and get the stuff done before orientation but it really wasn't necessary. A lot of people hadn't even started getting their stuff done by the time orientation came around. You can always call and double-check but I think there's really no need for them to have your PPD results or CPR card until the semester starts. And I think the CPR certification is about 4 hours. My class ran at a fast pace and I think we finished in under 3.

Thanks...yeah you're pretty much telling me what I was thinking. Sigh...well I'm going to call the recruiter at one of the other hospitals I've not applied to yet. Everything I've heard says they won't hire new grads into the units, but it can't hurt to ask. At least the recruiter for a different hospital in the system said she had never heard that, and she was the one to give me the name and number for that recruiter, so I'll see what she says. I'm not writing off the hospital w/ the 60+ bed NICU yet, but I do really wish I could get a good position in one of the other hospitals.

Hi there. I'm graduating with my BSN in December and I've really been leaning towards the NICU for quite a while, though I'm also starting to get curious about PICU. Anyway, I'm lucky in that I live in a metropolitan area with several different hospitals with level II and level III NICU's. I applied almost 2 months ago to the NICU at the free-standing children's hospital in my area (the internship program said to apply after Aug. 1st) and have yet to hear back from them, despite their constant advertising of their internship programs and open houses for new grads. I also applied to a large non-profit hospital system and was contacted the following day. I've since had a phone interview and the managers of 2 different NICUs are supposed to be contacting me within a few days. I was also given the number to call the recruiter at another hospital a little further away to talk with her about their programs, and there's also another hospital I haven't applied to yet, but possibly will in the future. So the NICU that hasn't called me yet is a 60+ bed level III in a teaching hospital. The other level III I've applied to has 10 beds (and is only a couple of years old), and the other NICU is a level II, not sure how many beds. And the one's I've not applied to yet are both level III. So, originally I was really desiring to work at the big level III at the children's hospital with internship programs. But I've since heard some not so great things about the hospital from current employees. The pay is the lowest in the area and they have poor nurse retention. The other hospitals I've applied to are in a great system that allows transfers throughout the system. They pay the highest in the area and are Magnet hospitals with high retention. So! Basically, I'm just wondering if I were to get hired at one of the smaller NICUs, would I be able to get a lot of experience there? I'm not sure how many beds the level II has, but I'm pretty sure it's more than 10. I want a place where I get a lot of experience, but also a hospital I can be happy with. Is 10 beds really small for a level III NICU? What are the benefits/drawbacks for starting at a level III v. level II? I'll be doing my preceptorship in a month in the 60+ bed NICU so I know I'll have a better idea of things then, but right now I don't think that hospital is my first choice anymore. Ok, any insight on this would be great! Thanks!

We did Med/Surg I & II this spring, so thankfully, I'm done! I really enjoyed most of it though and I'm very glad we took both at the same time because I think it made the med/surg HESI much easier with all the info being fresh. Plus I felt like I progressed in the hospital a lot faster because I had a larger base of knowledge to use. But man, doing it over the summer in such a short semester will be tough. At least they'll be your only classes, right? Good luck!

:angryfire I really don't feel like many people have actually read the whole article. So many people are just making these quick judgments on this girl over one comment she made. Where does it say she expects to "breeze through it"? The article isn't about the content difficulty of nursing school. It's not about how hard nursing school supposedly is. It's about the nursing shortage and how schools have to turn down many QUALIFIED applicants. She is still a qualified applicant, regardless of how much you might dislike her comment, although I think a lot of people here are misinterpreting it. Some schools don't even require a 3.0 GPA so why are people giving this girl such a hard time over a 3.29? Some schools don't rank, they just have waiting lists and let people in when their turn is up. Why is everyone making all these negative assumptions about one girl who obviously wants to be a nurse enough to apply several times in a row? Not to mention, in the article it says, "Outside of school Edmundson recently organized a walkathon to raise money for cancer research. At home she has been a help mate to an autistic younger brother". Those sound like positive qualities to me. When we walk into the hospital, we have access to tons of confidential patient information. We get the whole picture. We can find out how many sexual partners our patients have had, if they've had abortions, or if they have histories of drug use or incarceration. And yet, WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO JUDGE*. We should treat all of our patients the same. So why is it, out of the hospital, when there is so little factual information available, people are so quick to judge and make assumptions? In the end, no one here has the right to assume they know more about this girl's situation than is presented in the article. You don't know what classes she's taking or if she works full time to help pay for school, or if she spends a lot of time taking care of her younger brother with autism so maybe she can't study as much as other students. No one has the right to judge her for whatever reason or assume she's not fit to be a nurse just because she thinks there should be more seats available in her school's nursing program. Such negative attitudes don't help anyone and they certainly don't do anything for the reputation of the nursing profession. Talk about nurses eating their young. Some people here are ripping this girl apart before she's even a nursing student. If this is how everyone acts, one day there really won't be any nurses left. *Wonderful information imparted to me by my mom, a critical care nurse of 37 years, upon my entry into nursing school, and something that every nurse should remember before every patient encounter.

Yeah that's how it went for us too. We were all together and any mention of the accelerated students was an afterthought, or else we had to try and get the info out of them. We did our orientation and matching on the same day, but you had orientation already but didn't match yet? Weird.

Hi there! Oh yeah, Match Day is just a day full of propaganda! Unless they've changed it, you'll get to sit through about 3 hours of presentations by the participating hospitals telling you how awesome they are and all the awesome things they do and the awesome benefits and the awesome doctors and nurses and the awesome awesomeness that is each hospital. After the first 2 they all sound the same and it pretty much comes down to location, location, location! They should have booths set up, giving away hospital-branded swag - go for the pens!! LOL, I think Moffitt even gives away lavender-scented linen spray. So after the recruitment attempts, you'll pick your matches. However, if you're accelerated, unless they've changed things, they don't have an accelerated team at each of the hospitals. When I started in the fall, our choices were Bayfront & St. Joe's. If you can get Bayfront, I'd go for it because we have the BEST clinical instructor in the world. But whatever team you end up on, you more than likely will end up very happy with it because you won't know anything else! All the hospitals in the area have their ups and downs but they all are able to give you good clinical experiences that will help you become a good nurse. It's pretty hard to go wrong, we're very lucky to get such good options!