ShyGecko

At the hospital I worked at it was very easy to get overtime. At one point I was working 5 12hr shifts per week, by choice.

I never wore my watch, I just kept it in my pocket. It didn't matter what hand I held it in when taking pulse, because I worked on an infant/toddler floor of a peds hospital and we took pulse with the stethoscope. I don't really have any experience taking pulse on adults with my watch, so I couldn't tell you there. I would probably agree and say wear it on the hand you take pulse with, so you can hold and watch the clock at the same time.

quote: "we are expected to be neat and clean, wear underwear (i can't believe we have to tell adults this), no thongs (again i can't believe we have to tell adult women this). we can pretty much wear whatever color shoes." "as for this, if they tried to tell me what kind of underwear to wear, i would have a serious problem. personally i think my nude colored thongs look better than the panty lines i see from the white granny panties some of my co-workers wear (and i am an adult woman)" i would seriously have a problem with this, and would either quit or not accept the position. i absolutely cannot wear regular underwear under pants. to me, it feels extremely uncomfortable. i wear nude color thongs that do not cut in on the sides and ride low so they never show above my waistline. i agree that my underwear looks much better than the panty lines you see on most nurses, especially the old school ones that still always wear white pants and white granny panties (yes, i worked with one of these at my last position...it looked terrible!!) plus,i think that regular underwear shows above the waistline much more than thongs do, especially when you bend over. yes, i am also an adult woman.

They are considered restraints at our hospital, and we have to have a new order from the physician every 24 hours in order to keep using them. We only use them if absolutely necessary, though.

At the hospital that I work at you can normally only work 12 hour shifts. You can only work an 8 hour shift if you pick up an extra shift and don't want to work overtime. Most everyone wants the overtime pay, so people rarely ever work 8 hour shifts.

I work in a Children's hospital on a floor that has mostly infants, and we do all rectal temps on children under 6 months. *shrug* I haven't heard anything about them being discouraged. I have used a temporal thermometer in the past, and bought one to use when I worked in childcare, and it worked great. There is a learning curve and it take some getting used to how to work it, but once you learn they are great. I accidentally left mine at the home where I used to nanny, and I still kick myself over that.

At our facility, the ONLY people that can delegate to CNA's are charge nurses and management. Nurses are not our supervisors, and are not allowed to delegate to us at all. This is said up front to everyone in general orientation, directly from the mouths of high management.

This is exactly how it is at our facility also. I am a CNA, and the only person at my work that can tell me what to do is the charge nurse and the management. The nurses are not in charge of us or above us in anyway, and are actually just as equally responsible for the CNA duties as we are! Nurses are expected as much as we are to do vitals, and feed babies, and change diapers, and everything else. I'm sorry, but I would NOT take kindly to someone calling me their "subordinate". I am as much friends with the nurses (and charge nurses) as I am with my fellow CNA's, and we all treat each other with the same level of respect. Besides our job duties and our level of education, to each person at my facility we are all considered equal as humans. We are told this from the front from the high management of the hospital, and are expected to act that way. Treating each other with anything less than respect is highly frowned upon.

I work at a hospital, and I get paid weekend diff. It is $1.30 per hour on top of the $1.62/hr night diff that I already make for working nights.

I'm not sure about Texas, but here in Nebraska you only have to be 16 to become a CNA.

I didn't start getting replies from hospitals in Omaha until I added my American Heart Association CPR training for healthcare providers on my resume. I know that at least Methodist and Children's hospital want that specific one, they don't want people with Red Cross certification anymore. I also didn't get a response from Children's until I decided to apply for nights...since they ONLY hire new CNA's on nights (there is a waiting list with current employess for the day positions).

It really depends on the hospital. I live and work in Omaha, also, and I know at least at Children's Hospital it doesn't matter if you are certified as a phlebotomist or not, they won't let you draw blood if you are working as a CNA (or Child Care Parner, as they call it here). I know, I asked b/c I was thinking about doing the same thing. I would find out from the hospital(s) you are thinking about applying at, b/c I wouldn't want to waste the time and money to take a course that I wouldn't be able to use anyway. You know?

I work in a Children's Hospital on a floor with children ages newborn to 3 years on average (we get the occasional spill-over from the floors with older children), and I normally have around 8 patients. Occasionally I have as many as 12 if someone calls in sick, or as little as 4-6 on the weekends when we typically have low patients counts.

At our hospital, the majority of us work 12 hour shifts, and anything 24 hours and above is considered full time, with full benefits. So yes, working three 12 hour shifts is full time with benefits. I get paid hourly as a CNA, and I'm pretty sure the nurses do also.

We HAVE to work every other of the 6 major holidays (memorial day, 4th of july, labor day, thanksgiving, christmas, and new years), and we are automatically scheduled for them. We work one set one year, and then switch to work the other three the next year. New Years is considered the last holiday of the year, so that people aren't stuck working two holidays that are so close together in a row when they switch (working mem day, labor day, and xmas, then switching to new years, 4th of july, and thanksgiving), which is nice, I think. Again, we are automatically scheduled for them, but you are welcome to find someone to work it for you or swap shifts. That happens a lot at my work. People will often swap thanksgiving for xmas, or xmas for new years and vice versa.

I know I'm probably way past the fact, but I just wanted to point something out in regards to these two statements. I know I'm not an MA, I'm a CNA, but in my certification class, they DID tell us that it is fraud to call ourselves or lead people to believe that we are nurses or anything other than CNA's. They told us that even if a pt or a pt's family member calls us a nurse we are supposed to correct them and tell them we are nursing assistants, or whatever our title is. They were sure to emphasize that we could get in a lot of trouble if we were to do anything like that.

As far as I know, the only shifts here are 0700-1930 and 1900-0730. I work at a Children's Hospital, and they only want the parents and/or children to have to get to know two nurses and two care partners (cna's) each day. More than that, and it's too confusing.

I just use Bare Minerals real quick to get rid of the shine and to even my skin out. That's it. Even when I go out I rarely wear much more than that, and since I work with babies I don't want it to rub off on them. I'd rather spend the extra time in the morning sleeping. We are allowed to wear "minimal" makeup at our workplace, but they don't want you to go overboard. If you do, they will send you home without pay to take it off and come back looking "decent". We are also not allowed to wear long or artificial nails or ANY nail polish if we work directly with patients.

We can wear whatever scrubs we want to, as long as they don't have team logos/names on them. We also can't wear tshirts unless it has a scrub top or jacket over it. Most everyone where I work wears print tops, since we work in a children's hospital. About every other day that I work I wear print, and on the opposite days I wear all solid with a long sleeved tshirt underneath. I feel strange wearing solid colors b/c I'm usually the only one doing so, but I just started building my collection of scrubs and I don't have many prints. I wear almost all Cherokee scrubs, flare pants.

When we are fully staffed for a night (which seems to be rare as of right now) we have 6-8 (usually closer to 8) patients between two nurses. We have 24 beds on each floor with the possibility of 26 if we utilize the treatment rooms as pt rooms. When we are short staffed, they typically only have two CNA's signed up to work each night, so we each get 12 or so pt's. I work in a Children's Hospital on a floor with children between the ages of newborn to 2 years old. It can be difficult when we have babies whose parents don't visit at all so they are completely dependent on us to feed them and such. We have volunteers that can sit and rock or interact with lonely babies, but they can't feed them or anything like that. We are lucky to have the benefit of mostly helpful nurses that are willing to do vitals, baths, and such to help us out.

Our orientation so far has been a week (m-f) in a classroom. The first three days were general orientation, the fourth day was general clinical orientation, and the last two days were department specific orientation. Starting next week we have an additional 6 weeks of training on the floor with another CNA, usually a senior status one but not always. I'm lucky to be with one that is. (Senior status comes after being there for 15-20 years.) We work a normal three 12 hour shifts during the week whenever our preceptor is scheduled to work, and we have one day where we are x-trained to receptionist. We start out for one week with only 2-3 beds, then another week with 3-4 beds, then another with 5-6 beds, and then the rest of the time is a full load. I'm also going to be working nights, but they train us for 4 weeks on days, then we have the last two weeks on nights. This is a children's hospital, btw.

At our hospital, we are required to wash our hands with 4% CHG soap and water with an MRSA pt. Otherwise we are allowed to use hand sanitizer (enough to rub vigorously for 15 seconds and have your hands STILL wet), but they prefer we wash our hands, since all the pt floors have CHG soap in each of the rooms. I prefer to wash my hands anyway b/c I hate the overly fragranced hand sanitizer that we have in our hospital. It gives me a headache.

I don't have to work Thanksgiving, so more than likely I will have to work Christmas Day and not New Years Day. I'm not sure yet, though. I only have my schedule through the 22nd of December. We work every other of the 6 major holidays, and then switch the next year.

I love Uniform Advantage. Their scrubs are super cute, and different than any I've seen. They are pretty inexpensive, also! I ordered a top from them, and they shipped it out the next day. I don't know how long it took to ship b/c it hasn't gotten here yet, but they shipped it on Friday. http://www.uniformadvantage.com/UAShop/assets/html/homepage.asp?URLCheck=1

OMG, that is so funny!