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Before I was a nurse 3 years ago, I worked for Harris Southwest in a PCU (same as IMC essentially) unit, and I generally liked the Harris system.. although I was a nurse tech at the time and did not know the things to look for in an employer that I would pay attention to now. I do know that the Harris hospitals are generally considered to be the nicer ones in Fort Worth as far as aesthetics. I had some clinicals at Baylor downtown on a med/surg unit that I didn't really care for, however BUMC in Dallas has a great rep. Parkland is of course a very well known teaching and research hospital, and if you're into caring for the type of population with a county hospital like JPS, nurses there are generally happy with their jobs as well. I don't think there was any one particular hospital that I ever heard "to stay away from" in Fort Worth. It seems to really all be individual unit-dependent, not necessarily hospital-dependent. I think your best bet would be to visit the units that are hiring, and find what you think would be a good fit for you. Good luck!! I'm an RN at Brackenridge (the Trauma Center in Austin) now, and I miss Fort Worth so much. I hope you find what you're looking for :)

Yeah, never worked in a place that an LVN could not draw blood.. They do pretty much the same things as I do, aside from some narcotic med restrictions and hanging blood.

I would go ahead and finish the bio degree since you're almost done, just to have it under your belt and give you more options in the future.. and then either get an associates and a community college for your RN, or like the others said, the better option is probably to do an accelerated BSN, as that's the trend for what hospitals are looking for. But either way, you'd be an RN. And it's a great asset in today's economy. I don't fear for my job at all right now as most people do.

Us too right now.. and I work in a major level 1 trauma center. We're getting cancelled and sent home all the time.

I had my baby when I was in nursing school in my final semester, so I never dealt with having young children to manage. But I did survive a pregnancy and a newborn during a very difficult semester, and all I can say is that you will live through it. Your management of it will totally depend on outside help from family, friends, and childcare resources like you were talking about. If you hear good things about the daycare center, I'd at least get on the waiting list becuase you can always take your kids out if you don't like it. It helps to have a hubby with a flexible schedule too, because outside of weird class and clinical times, you're going to be doing a lot of studying and will need someone to watch the kiddos. So, long story short.. you totally can do it! It's done by moms, and even single moms, all the time. Just figure out what will work for you, and there are always resources to help you out.

No, LTC is usually post-hospitalization patients or patients coming out of rehab who are not yet ready to be fully discharged to home and need continuing care. There are different types of long term care, some acute and some not. I don't know a whole lot about it, but from discharging patients to LTC facilities, that is the types of patients they seem to take.

Basically how Versant works is that you apply for any GN opening you choose to apply for, and you will simultaneously be applying for Versant. If you get a job after interviewing on different floors and you take a position, you're automatically accepted for Versant too. So you basically just have to be hired. If you have less than 1 yr nursing experience, everyone goes through that same process when applying at Seton. So as long as there is still room to hire within Seton, there will be Versant spots open. They kind of determine the number of Versant openings by how many new jobs are approved for each individual floor.

And remember - with nursing, you can try a schedule and if it doesn't work.. you can always leave for another hospital or change your area of nursing entirely. Nothing is permanent. If nights turn out to not be a great fit for you, a school nurse job might just pop up at your daughter's school and you might have her same schedule, you know? There are so many options and it will just take some tweaking to get yours right.

Well like I said, it totally depends on your situation. That may well be what works best for you, and that may be totally unworkable for someone else. I personally was so wiped out from night shift, I felt like I spent all my days recovering rather than enjoying time with my child. However, my child does not have kindergarten to go to, which would be some good time to sleeo.. she only has a mothers day out 3 mornings a week to help us out. As far as shifts go, no I did mean four 8hr shifts, not 5. You MIGHT be able to find a place that does that, I've just never seen it.In the hospital world, 32 hours is considered full time for most networks. This is becuase if you worked five 8 hr shifts, that would automatically always put you at 40hrs, and any thing over that is considered overtime. And since you'd actually have to arrive at your shift 15 min early and leave 15 min later than your shift's start and end time (for nursing report, etc), that would always put you into overtime.. and I will tell you it is rare for a nurse's job to be over at the end of their shift. I am usually still there charting for at least 15 to 30 minutes on a fairly good day. Also, if you worked 5 8hr shifts, that would leave very little flexibility in your scheduling, as most units require you to rotate and work some weekends here and there unless you have alot of staff on weekend plan. Every nurse I work with has a unique childcare situation.. and we all have our kids doing something different to make our lives work. You just have to figure out what works for you. Nights may be it. Nursing is defintiely not ideal for being a single mother, although there are some great positives to it as well if you can get it worked out right. Best of luck to you!

Have you thought of office nursing? I worked for an OBGYN group for a while and worked M-F hours.. but the way it was set up, we always ended up getting one day off a week when our doctor was post-call, so I worked MTWF 7:30 to 5pm. No weekends, no holidays.

It totally depends on your situation. If you are a single mom with a child who is in school, my recommendation is to get into office nursing because your hours with better correlate with your child's school hours, and you will not be working weekends/holidays. School nursing would be even better because you'd also have the summers off with your child. If you have a younger child, hospital nursing may be better because you can (depending on where you work) choose to work four 8hr or three 12hr shifts. That can work out great if you can find a hospital that has good on-site childcare because they'll even stay open til 7pm until your shift is over. I am kind of in that situation right now. I am working three 12s and I have a two yr old that stays with her dad some days and my mom some days. I like having more days off with her than I would if I worked in an office 4 or 5 days a week. As she gets older though, I will most likely go into office or school nursing so I can have evenings at home with her and not have to battle the holiday time. Hope that helps.

AvenueQT - I got hired with OBGyn Group of Austin (previously DesRosier & Wernecke Assoc.), and they are one of the only places I know of that is open to hiring new grads. I think I mainly got the position because I had been a longtime patient of theirs and knew their nursing manager, and they knew I had a special interest in women's health. Otherwise, I think it would have been very difficult to find an office job as a new grad. HOWEVER, I will say, office nursing is VERY different from hospital, and although it is more laid back, there is very little training (one week for me as opposed to 4 months at the hospital) and I felt extremely unprepared to be managing a doctor's patients the way office nurses do because they expected me to know a lot more than I did. I also felt like I was not getting very good learning experience and time management skills that I am getting at Brack now. I think later on, I'd love to go back to an office, and when I do, I'll kick ass at it because I'm so much more well rounded as a nurse after this year of doing hospital nursing experience. Just a tip for ya :)

Yep... I got that same email last year, and that's about when I gave up on them. It's ridiculous. It's like, thanks for acknowledging that I applied within the last 6 months. I didn't even get that email until after I'd already gotten a job somewhere else.

I will just say... even though my best friend's mother is the workforce development manager for St. Davids.. I STILL couldn't get an interview with them. I applied and was persistent in staying in touch wtih the recruiter.. kept calling... waited forever. It was a nightmare. Seton calls back way faster and got me an interview, even though there weren;t openings in the area I wanted. I took a job with Seton and even though that unit is not where I'll probably stay for years, it got my foot in the door with the hospital system so I can transfer later. Good luck with St. Davids. They are NOT good about working with applicants. Also, all the Austin hospitals are on a hiring freeze to some extent.. some more than others.

I did clinicals on the psych units at both JPS Trinity Springs and Huguley. I liked both units.

Some hospitals post RN positions for any RN across the board, including ones who are brand new out of nursing school, some have specific GN positions posted, and some have one GN application for all GNs nonspecific to a certain position. All hospitals will hire GNs or new RNs without experience, and most will put you through an internship or residency before you're out there on your own anyway. So just call and talk to the nurse recruiters for the hospitals you're interested in and they'll tell you how they do it. You probably cannot negotiate on hourly pay though... I worked as an OBGYN office nurse for 6 months after nursing school so I technically had "experience" when I got hired at my current hospital unit, but since I did not have a year of hospital experience, I was required to go through their RN residency program and we all started at the same base pay. Most hospitals do it that way. Good luck! Dallas has some great hospitals.

Austin rocks and is very family/dog friendly! I am an RN at Brackenridge Hospital (a magnet member of the Seton hospital system, and now a Level I Trauma Center!) and I LOVE it there. I think you'd be very happy if Austin is your choice of relocation :)

I work for Seton in Austin (Brack). I will say that my residency cohort of 70+ people has 2 or 3 ED hires in it.. and that's more than the previous cohort or the one after that. So while it is possible to go straight into ER/ED, it's very rare right now to find a position. The ERs just don't support new grads well for some reason, I think because it's so hard to train GNs in that environment. The ED hires are all very overwhelmed. However, you do have paramedic experience and that will definitely be a benefit for you during the interview and hiring process. I wish you luck in finding a job!

FYI, the Versant program in Austin is run 4 times a year, not twice. And there absolutely are jobs in Austin, just maybe not the exactly perfect one you might want. But a lot of people get lucky here and land great jobs in their department of first choice!

I was gonna say exactly what Prettyladie said, so I won't go into that any more than she did! But I will say, yes the program is great. I loved it, and it was totally worth the "$14,000" a semester that I paid (which I'm not sure is even accurate because it wasn't quite that pricey when I was there a year and a half ago). Plus TCU is great about scholarships, being a private university, so nobody ever actually pays that much. You get really good one on one with your professors and instructors, and in general they all wanted us to succeed and did everything they could to help us get there. My final semester, I was pregnant and had a huge disadvantage. Everyone told me I was going to have to take a semester off and graduate late. All of my teachers bent over backwards and did WAY more than they had to in order to let me graduate and walk with my nursing class across the stage. That's the kind of priority you get at TCU. I would do it all over again any day.

Seton and St. Davids are the two main hospital systems here. I work for Seton, just started as a new graduate RN and am going through their RN Residency program that is provided for their new nurses that get hired into the Seton system. Seton is by far the more popular place to work as far as nurses are concerned, being the non-profit and magnet status, however some people love St. Davids as well. Typically here in Austin for either system, you need to get in touch with a nurse recruiter, let them know you're interested in GN positions, and apply for a general GN opening online. Then they forward your application to the various departments you're interested in. I haven't applied anywhere that didn't handle their GNs that way. I work at Brack (the trauma center) and am learning TONS in the residency program, which is full time and paid. I'd suggest looking into that program. As far a WHEN to apply - do it as soon as you want to! I'd start talking to recruiters sooner rather than later so you're able to get interviews in the units you like. Austin is a fairly competitive nursing market too, just to warn you. Some people got lucky and got into their first choice, but most (including me) are starting out in other units with plans to work their way into a different area eventually. The nice thing about Seton is that they hire from within first.. so if you start in acute care, for example, they are very supportive of moving you up into ER or ICU if that's where your heart is.

I've had a week on med/surg... but I know I won't be staying! I'm gonna stick it out as long as I can for the experience and to get through my training program.. but I, like you, know that this is not my calling. I will be looking for other avenues. Good for you for trying though :)

I just started at Seton this week, and I'm trying to figure out which health care plan to choose. I can't figure out the difference between the Seton basic EPN vs. Expanded EPN plan.. and noone seems to be able to give me a straight answer! It seems to me that the major difference is that Expanded has more providers and it's more expensive. My husband and my baby are also going to be on the plan... so which is better for a family? Or does it matter? Anyone have any experience with this??

Thanks! And I'm sure my employer does know that.. I'm starting Monday and was just going by the email request to all new RNs for a current license. Good to know.

I just renewed my RN license for the first time. I did it online. Are they supposed to send me a new license/certificate/card that has the new expiration date on it? I renewed like 2 months ago and haven't heard or received anything since then.. I'm starting a new job this week and they need my current license.. getting kinda worried about this!!