lostinthedesert

Thank you Katlove, that is a great idea!

I am a PACU RN and have been on disability/unemployed since 2012 for back and hip surgery with complications. I can no longer do bedside nursing, unable to stand for extended periods. I would like to find employment in some kind of administrative position, but how do I explain the employment gap? I am afraid that if I mention my physical problems, nobody will want to hire me. I did apply for quite a lot of jobs in case management and customer service, but haven't had any response. I even took a course in medical coding and billing, thinking that there would be great demand for it, but that was a waste of time (and money), because I tried for over a year to find employment with no luck at all. Any suggestions?

I became a nurse very late in life. After divorce at age 50 I attended a nursing program and graduated in 2004. I worked HARD to achieve this, and as the reader can imagine, it was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Right out of nursing school I started night shifts in the ICU of a very busy and very acute community hospital. After sleeping at night and working during the day for about 32 years of my life, this was an excruciating experience. 6 months after starting this new job and finally getting into the swing of things I injured my back while lifting heavy patients. I had back surgery and returned to work after about 3 months, working in the Recovery Room. I changed jobs several years later to work in recovery in a mostly outpatient surgical hospital. As time went by and I approached my 60's, I realized more and more that my body just wasn't used to the wear and tear of a job that is extremely physical. As the economy continued its nose dive, the hospital cut back on aides and RN's, which made our work even more difficult. I ended up re-injuring my back and developed arthritis in my hips and hands from the constant stress of working with inadequate support and out of date equipment. I started to research options to change jobs: Case management, home care, travel nursing, and many other possibilities. This month I finished an online course on Legal Nurse Consulting, which seems like a really good idea. At my age I don't really have the option of lengthy continuing education, especially with the constant physical challenges I face every day. I think the message I am trying to convey is that when you reach the age of 60 and over, changing careers is a challenge, and if you have plans to advance your education, you should consider doing that as soon as possible rather than waiting until it's your only option. I didn't really have that option, because I HAD to work and did not really build up enough expertise in my field to feel confident about returning to school. My energy levels are not the same as they were even 10 years ago, and the injuries make it difficult to work out to increase them. For me, hindsight is 20/20, but any young RN reading this might benefit from this advice.

Hello everyone! It has been a long time since I perused this website - I was a nursing student then! It has been 10 years since then, and for the past 5 years I have been working in a surgical hospital that was a dream to work for when I first started. About 2 years ago they brought in a new CNO, who has made it her goal to increase the bottom line at the expense of everyone's sanity. At first we had a meeting where we were told that we needed to cut back on overtime and missed meals. Well, nobody wants to work overtime, so that was not such a bad thing. After the first few months, we had brought those expenses down to about 10 % of what it used to be - not bad, right? But that wasn't enough - now it has come to the point where we rarely have any help while our workload has increased because they are trying to save money by not making the techs work more than 6 hours a day. The number of RN's in the unit has been severely restricted. For a load of 15 surgeries we have 3 or 4 RN's, and often, by the time patients come out of surgery, either one or two are at lunch or ready to go home. God forbid we get an isolation patient - then we are down one more nurse who has to stay with that patient. More and more often, surgeries end much later than expected, so by the time we finally get busy, the techs are gone, and we are left to discharge patients, transport inpatients in those heavy beds from our floor to their rooms, setting up ortho machines, running back and forth for water, towels, blankets, medications etc. I work in PACU, and we are not supposed to have more than 2 patients at a time. Although our patients are more acute than ever (supposedly we are not allowed to treat patients with an ASA more than 3, yeah right!), increasingly we find ourselves with three patients, and more coming out of surgery. There are times where we do a kind of triage - the less "needy" patients just lay there hooked up to the monitor while we take care of the ones who need pain meds or whatever, and sometimes we don't get to them for 20 min to half an hour! In the middle of the afternoon, the CNO walks in and sends nurses home when we are all totally exhausted, because there are "too many nurses". The remaining RN's just have to work that much harder. We don't have a lounge, no place to sit for a minute and catch our breath. If we sit down at the nurse's station, we are considered lazy. One of our techs was asked to sit with a patient for an hour and a half to watch the monitor for heart irregularities while the nurse took care of her other patients. We are all completely exhausted. People are getting hurt and having hypertensive crises because there is no time to recover. Work is non-stop and excruciating. It is neither safe for the patients nor for us. I know, "wah-wah-wah" ...... Do we have any recourse at all, or is that the way things will be from now on?