ecipsoh

Your description sounds similar to the facility where I was working. On evening duty the supervisors usually were gone leaving the "residential counselors" and the nurses. On this one night it took ten police men coming in to get safety back to the unit and facility. They were not to happy about being the "security" for this place either. This place can not keep it's workers and it is simply from cutting out the security.

Thank you for your responses. I left out a few incidents on purpose, so not to sound so dramatic, but after reading your posts, I know this place needs security. This was my first experience in a psychiatric facility, so I just didn't know what to expect.

I am a new grad nurse. I found a RN position working with in a psychiatric facility for troubled adolescents. I am curious as to how other facilities are operated. This one has residential counselors who ideally work 5 children to one counselor, but it ends up being considerably more than that since the facility has a large turn over of workers. When there is a crisis on one of the units it is the residential counselor, usually female and a nurse who are responsible for maintaining the crisis. This means restraining if need be. The kids run in age from 7 to 21 and some are quite large and violent. Last week three codes were called on three separate units simultaneously, so there was no backup counselors to help restrain the fighting adolescents. The older adolescents broke free from their unit and it was up to three nurses all female and one residential counselor to get them back on their unit. This of course did not work and the police were called. They did not want to come in and said they were not security for that building, but eventually did help when they found out the residents had taken the keys and soon it would become their problem. I have only been there two weeks and I have resigned, but I am left with questions of what a facility uses for security, and what or whom should I contact, because this was the mildest of the crisis I witnessed in two weeks. Is this "the norm"????? Thank You

I can relate to the circumstances you find yourself in. I just resigned from my 2nd nursing job in 5 months. I REFUSE to work in an unsafe environment for me as well as for patients. I do not know now if I will ever get to practice as an RN since I am an new graduate, but I don't focus on that, instead I reflected on why I wanted to be a nurse (to help others) and today I spent 8 hrs in training to be a volunteer for Hospice, for the first time since becoming a nurse I feel like I'm on the right track. Yes this economy seems to not be the greatest it has been, but I will never know if I don't go for what it is I truly want.