Nurse_Wretched

I have a coworker who is a drama queen! She loves to pick on the weekend staff and tell us how everything is done better during the weekdays. LOL I walk away and do my job as it should be done. She has just been promoted to a managerial position. I wish my employer the best of luck with that! Haha. She should get her own reality show. She definitely can't go without enormous amounts of attention!

Nurses have to do their job until the point at which they are satisfied and happy with themselves! Management will never be happy because their jobs suck far worse than any of ours. Be thankful you are a shift worker! My boss works 50+ hour weeks, raises two little kids, does the schedule (and deals with the constant call off drama queens), takes calls during the weekends on his days "off", etc... He has all of the responsibility and NONE of the authority. The families yell at him and nag the crap out of him over every little thing. Upper management hands him random and impossible tasks on a daily basis. Yeah. Sometimes nursing does suck... It is the reality of the job! Middle management sucks festering syphilitic llama c****.

Wow! Sounds like this job will be yours if you want it! I have profound respect for anyone who can be a cop and still love humanity at the end of the day... I've worked in so many different places and all of them were looking for technical skill as well as a good personality fit. Most of the asked me interview questions about resolving conflicts with coworkers, dealing with diversity, and customer service and complaint resolution. Some of them even gave me a small written test of basic nursing knowledge.

The patients in LTC are being taken advantage of... Facilities repeatedly understaff and try to gloss over it when the families are around. They aren't fooling anyone. They like to try to guilt you into believing that: 1) You are the only one who has to stay after to get your charting done 2) You are the only one who is late with giving meds 3) You are a bad nurse because you forgot to give a calcium. LTC is, at best, somewhat tolerable. At worst, it is a nightmare and a liability... I adore the elderly patients and this system screws them over every chance it gets! It makes me sad because I judge our healthcare system by how it treats its most vulnerable consumers...

Dayum! This weekend sucked! I don't know where to even begin... The entire schedule was an epic trainwreck! LOL I'll explain... Very few of my coworkers want to work weekends so several of them call off ALOT. I only work a few days a week and I am getting call offs from the same people! They want the full time benefits but they don't want to work the schedule. They accept weekends as part of their schedule because the long term staff have the good schedules. Makes sense to me! From what I hear, management has begun writing people up for all of these call offs. This weekend 2 of 3 of the sunday AM shift nursing assistants called off so they had to be replaced. Then someone who always calls off for eve shift tried to call off when she wasn't even on the schedule! LOL I have received countless call offs from her even though I only work a few days a week... My honest assessment is that the staff is tired, fried, and burned out! The residents there have pretty severe behavioral issues and it a notoriously difficult unit to work on! On the weekends, we have so few staff. Then we have a staff member from another department who comes in to "help". She is very helpful in some aspects but she is also an incessant complainer who thinks that her words are golden if she speaks in a loud and forceful tone. It adds yet one more thing for myself, the charge nurse, to deal with... Not only am I dealing with agency staff in the absence of the routine staff, but I am having to put her in her place while I deal with the demands of residents, their family members, giving medications to 21 often difficult residents who are resistant to care, answering the phone, charting, trying to prevent people from falling, etc... I constantly have to direct the agency and non routine staff to do their job and then I have the kitchen staff complaining about random crap... I don't like my job anymore. I adore the patients but the weekend shift is stuck in a negative feedback loop and I feel as if I need to move on. I don't think that my employer has any concerns about retaining staff... They are drowning my boss. He never seems to have a day off. Those of us who actually show up for weekends feel unduly punished. The staff complains incessantly that things are not done as they are done on the weekdays. I am sorry that I am not up to their unrealistic standards. I am looking for a new job. I am in no hurry because this job pays well... But I would like to do something that I feel passionate about. This is far too much useless drama for me! This feels like a neverending and thankless task. I am willing to take a 20% pay cut for the right job... I am open to the possibilities! I would rather be happy and have mediocre pay. I NEVER want to work extra hours at this job. The two days I work burn me out already. This wasn't an issue with my other jobs... I used to work alot more. I lost my job of 3.5 years to budget cuts and things have sucked ever since then... I am willing to wait for the right job to come along. I will wait a year or more if I need to. I would rather have a good job fit than another quick fix...

I agree, Bklyn_RN. It's unethical. The for profit hospitals/medical facilities hold the nurses to the highest possible standards while taking the low road themselves... The ironic thing is that any nurse they have deemed as worthy is too good to work for them.

Nursing homes often smell like barnyards! LOL When I worked in LTC I would put perfumed lotion under my nose at times. Haha. I still remember the 104 year old patient who stood up from her wheelchair during church service and exclaimed loudly (with alot of expletives) that she had to go take a crap. Muahahahahahahaha! That poor chaplain... Yeah. Everything, "only happens on the weekends..."...until one reads the charting and realizes that it happens every single day all day long. LOL Maybe the patients save their huge sh*ts for saturdays and sundays! Time to invest in some Renuzit!

Yeah. I worked a double on Christmas day 2011 + a double on New Year's Day 2012 + a double on my birthday 2012 after getting snowed in and stuck at work. After working a double on my b-day I got stranded at work and walked in the snow for an hour at 12am. Haha. No buses and no taxis anywhere. Kinda' sucked. LOL Christmas 2011 was a clusterf**k. Some staff didn't show up for work that day. We were understaffed with family members everywhere... Not good. Lots of expectations with an exhausted staff trying to fulfill them all. Awesome! If I keep on working this schedule for a while, none of the holidays will be mine this year or next year. Holiday drama is not worth the extra pay.

Holiday weekend noc staff... Haha. Ya'll really know how to up the ante on that one! LOL

I had a job like yours, JenLPN001... I loved it there! Everyone did everything. One day I made bkfst, lunch, and dinner for 50 people because the cook had gotten into a car accident. I charted, I passed meds, I talked to clients about anything and everything. Budget cuts took my job away and I miss it so much now! At my current job I am a very good nurse but I often feel that I am going through the motions trying to please this one and that one... So much useless staff and family drama and none of it is about anything medical. It is very busy there but it isn't very interesting at all. I long for a job that I am passionate about... I would take a 20% pay cut if the right job came along. I worked alot of extra hours there because I was happy with my job... I never dreaded going to work. How does one get their employer to understand that the staffing problems are created by upper management and their unrealistic expectations???

It's always the nurse's fault... LOL Polio, the civil wars, Pompeii, Hurricane Katrina, sucky institutional food, rectal prolapse...blame the nurses! Muahahahahahahaha!

Mostly, though, I have worked for non-profits... And it hasn't always been heaven! Trust me on this one! Some of them constantly understaff and blame the nurses for it. I last for 7 months at one facility many years ago. They were supposedly an LTC but the care was far more transitional than anything else. They thought nothing of giving me multiple admits in one shift while I had 22 other patients...many of whom would fall all of the time... Other were tube meds multiple times a shift, some were resistant to care... They can hire a new grad for that BS. I adored the patients there and I felt bad for them. They were not getting what had been promised to them.

I worked for a for profit LTC just after graduation... The care was sub-standard at best but I loved my job there! The patients were a unique bunch of folks. We had everything...drug addicts, prostitutes, young disabled folks, elderly patients, severely mentally ill patients, etc... We'd see a story on the news and that person would get wheeled into one of our units several weeks later! LOL I miss that crazy place. I miss the staff, the patients, the entertainment...

Been there, done that...we do staff parties and all of that crap. Corporate pep rally meetings too. Eeeeeeewwwww. LOL All of that is fine and well but we need to staff correctly because it is a matter of patient care and that is why we are there! It's great to "appreciate" staff in a myriad of ways but the ultimate boost to staff morale comes from proper staffing and accusation cessation... I stick up for the other staff because they are treated unfairly and it ****** me off.

And, yeah...I'd work more just for the heck of it if my job wasn't so taxing and abusive... I worked alot in my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd jobs. I loved my job then and it wasn't an issue. None of these jobs exist anymore. Too bad. I had a boss who I adored and would do anything for at my 2nd job. I worked all kinds of overtime and crazy schedules. At this point in time, I don't want to risk becoming burned out. I am getting tired of having to constantly prove my worth. I feel as if I am getting too old to have to constantly explain myself to anyone. My ability to care about all of that is going away... Must be menopause. It seems to have dropped itself on my doorstep. I don't mind. If I was sane, I wouldn't be going back to nursing school again... LOL