IdahoGrad

I'm a med/surg RN with 4 yrs experience and am one month into my new job in the OR. I currently make $24/hr on days, which I feel is pretty good since when I worked nights on the floor the shift diff was $3.50/hr and started as a new grad at $20 an hour. (In Idaho the pay is not real competitive...) Now that I'm in the OR, I get to work days and no weekends for the same pay (as working nights/weekends on the floor) and at my eval in May I anticipate my pay going to $25.50. May is when I actually hit 4 yrs of experience. I am still in training so I won't take call for another 6 months or so, but call is $3/hr where I work and add time and a half for call back.... that will be some sweet cash! However, I am thankful that we are actually well staffed and most of the time the callbacks don't even happen, so it's just $3/hr which is probably not really noticable for a shift or 2 per month. A lot of people don't like to be on call and so there's always a list in the lounge of people wanting to give up their call and you can sign up for it and then that $3/hr would start to add up, especially since like I said, you don't often get called in, you're just available. Anyway, hope that's helpful.

Thanks, everyone, for all your great replies! This makes me look forward to our presentations tomorrow, now that I have something more fun to put up on the projector screen than a power point :)

Hi, I am an experienced med/surg RN who is new to the OR and am in a training program where we are to present a topic to the group. My topic is Counts/Preventing the Retention of Foreign Bodies. I'm trying to come up with something interesting besides a power point on the policy! (a lot of our training so far has been power points of safety topics.... important but kind of dry...) I would love to give other new OR nurses tips on where to look for items missing during closing counts. Any good stories of how an item was found or where it was found would be helpful. I have also heard that a few surgeons like to hide things as a joke for new staff, just to watch them sweat during a count. Has this ever happened to you? Where did the surgeon hide things and how did you handle it? Any other suggestions on how to prevent the retention of foreign bodies or how to present this topic in an interesting manner would be so helpful. If anyone has any little tips or tricks on how to make sure the first count is correct, goes smoothly, and how to have good communication and timing with scrubs about the count, that would be great! Thanks, Julie, RN