Eldow076

Clinical analysts can work from home (at least at our facility) we just use Citrix to remote in. I will say it's harder working at home then in the office mostly due to monitor setup. I won't be doing time at home until I have my dual monitors because I can't imagine building on one screen.

Honestly? Determination. It took me 5 years to finally get into informatics. I had interviewed at my old facility and didn't get the job. Then I moved to my new hospital which I will be a lifer at so it was important that I got into THIS IT department. I applied a couple times and then finally got an interview with the Meditech Clinical Applications group. The manager used to be a nurse manager in our medical center and one of the team people was my old floor manager. Then I had to sell myself. I researched a lot about meaningful use and HL7 so I would know at least a little something going in. That whole long story was to show that it took time and experience before I was able to finally make the switch. I also had to agree to a $1 paycut to my hourly rate (I'm now salary) to make up for my lack of IT experience. The best place to start is the facility you currently work at. Volunteer for any "superuser" opportunites as they come up. I was a super user at every facility I worked at for everything from Omnicell to Vocera. If you interview for a position and don't get it, follow up with the manager to see where you can improve next time a position opens.

I interview Monday for an informatics position at my facility and have a question regarding on of the acronyms they used on the job details. It says "IRN nurse will work closely with FIT/FAST lead", what does FIT/FAST stand for? I have never worked in IT before but am wicked quick with computers, there is not an application out there that can defeat me! Lol. I want to appear somewhat in the know when I go for my interview.I have worked as a Superuser on everything from Eclypsis to Omnicell so I have that experience. I am really excited about the opportunity but since I don't have a lot of experience have been trying to read up on the industry a little.

I wish i could say things are getting better but there not. In the past month I have had to repeat my orientation, which took away all of my weekends and they tried to take my holiday and I pulled the plug on that one. No one will give me a straight answer as to why this is all going on. I transfered to our other unit thinking that it would be better and it was for 2 weeks. Evidentally some "pods" dont like nurses floating in so they throw you under the nearest bus available at the time. My new supervisor asked my "peers" if they had any issues with me....they had the nerve to say I wasn't answering my alarms, #1 There was no one around me all day and I was answering EVERYONE's alarms #2 I had a kid that dinged off every 5 secs. so i spent most of time with him. So my supervisor says "Maybe we'll give you a real dinger next week so you can practice answering alarms". Yes that is why I went to nursing school so i can be treated like a 1st grader:banghead: I have since applied to 3 different hospitals for their Level 2/Well Baby nurseries and have heard nothing back. I posted my resume to Monster and now get calls from every staffing/travel agency in the country. At this point I have no idea what to do.......

I have a couple options, we have another facility that does more "small baby" cases and is attached to an L&D. Right now I am in more of a Med-Surg NICU, we get everything from small babies transported in to cardiac defects waiting for surgery. On any given day I could have a train wreck or an ER admit that has elevated bili. So I could ask to be moved to the other unit and have a lot more routine patient type. I can also see about moving to our CCN or level 2 but most of those nurses have been in the NICU 20 years. The thing that is most depressing is that I was finally starting to feel competent in my skills, in one felled swoop I was made to feel like a moron. I graduated top of my class from nursing school, I am a smart person! The other part is the people I work with, they tell me to ask questions but then dont have time to help me or roll their eyes because "I obvioulsy have no idea what I'm doing." One nurse actually complained to management because I asked her a question about an off floor test (I just came from nights where we dont take kids to procedures) which in her mind i should have known the answer to. BTW these are young nurses, maybe graduated a year before me. The day that everything hit the fan I did talk to my supervisor and the NICU manager (another lovely pull me into the office incidents). They continue to act like this whole thing is no big deal, that I will do a couple of preceptor shifts and everything will be fine.

I have been in the NICU as an RN for almost a year on my own. I don't think it's where I belong. I had to take these horrible PBSD (sp?) vidoe competencies that were filmed in at least 1972. I asked before hand how important they were since I had to come in on my day off to take them. I was told they were no big deal, wouldnt take that long, ect. Well, I hurried through them because I didn't plan to be there very long, after hour 2 I had to pack it in. The whole time not thinking they were a big deal, then I get dragged into the educator's office to discuss how badly i did, how I have to take extra education classes, and even worse, preceptor shifts!!! Are you kidding me, if i had known I would be labeled a bad nurse over these stupid videos i would have dedicated a whole day to them. As of right now they won't even let me on the floor to work until i have these "precepted shifts". This is just the tip of the iceberg, on almost a daily basis I am "talked to" about something I did or didn't do. The breaking point for me (literally) was when I had a patient's IV go out at the end of shift and was told to turn off the IVF and let night shift start the new one. The night manager turned around and told my supervisor that the IVF had been off for an hour and the kid was NPO (he had been eating since the morning). And this is commonplace with this night manager (I don't know what I did to **** her off but she regularly complains about me to my day supervisor). On top of all this my primary passed and i have never cried as much as I did that day. I don't think I can ever take another one, in fact the mere thought of going through that pain again makes me want to cry all over again. At this point I don't know what to do. The director of the NICU asked if maybe this wasn't the best fit for me, due to stress. I hardly ever eat anymore, and feel like i may have developed a couple ulcers. Should I continue to plug along and just try harder to get it (whatever it is) or look into another area? My husband can't understand why I'm not in L&D since that was the whole reason I went to nursing school to begin with. HELP!!!!! Depressed in AZ