Big5-Oh!

Hey, SL, glad to hear you're feeling a little better about the whole thing. Here's one other thing you might consider: Write a letter - SHORT, sweet (very sweet, very professional), and to the point - to the HR mgr or the senior partner of the group, appealing your dismissal. The point is not to get your job back - I mean, really. Do you wanna go back to the hellhole? The point is, when you are asked if you have been fired, you can honestly say "yes, BUT... I have appealed the dismissal because I believe I was wrongfully dismissed under the business's personnel policies. I am not pursuing LEGAL ACTION, and I am not attempting to regain employment with them, but I AM trying to clear my name". I would NOT try to say anything like "I was discriminated against" or "I was treated unfairly". Face it, we're all discriminated against, sooner or later, and we're all treated unfairly. BUT if you honestly feel like they singled you out, or lied (I think I remember you saying she lied on a write-up?) then they surely have personnel policies against that kind of behavior and you have every right to appeal your dismissal. Tell the TRUTH, but be diplomatic and don't sound like a whiner or a victim. Sound like somebody who was wronged, who is working (NOT "FIGHTING") to corect the wrong, and most of all just moving on and being professional. Hope this helps.

ALWAYS get a letter of reference from SOMEbody there - ask the Dr., or the accountant or somebody to write a letter. If your only problem was with the one person, and if it was as obvious to staff as you describe, the Dr. should be willing to write you a short note saying how (s)he appreciated your contribution to the organization. Then make sure you sign up with an agency or a recruiter NOW to have aslittlegapaspossible in your resume!! Good luck. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but this was a blessing to you. Life is too damn short to work for a witch. And we all know they're out there!!! Good luck and God bless.

Bri, A job is a job. There are always going to be parts you like, and parts you don't like. The secret to finding out what to do, in my opinion and my opinion only!, is to decide if the parts you like outweigh the parts you don't. What are patients like? They're people! Some are great; they can be kind and funny and upbeat and cheerful and caring and spiritual. Some are a**holes; they can be cranky and mean and hateful and needier than you think they should be. Mostly they're all just scared. Because they're sick, and some of them are dying, and many of them are in a great deal of pain - physically or emotionally or mentally or all of the above. Some days you will be able to remember this and you'll be a good nurse. Other days, you'll have your own worries and bills and sick kids and laid-off husband and nagging mother-in-law and flat tire and the computers won't be working in the lab and you'll forget that the patients are scared and in pain, and you won't be as good a nurse as you ought to be. You won't be as good a nurse as your patients deserve. But if you decide to do this job, do it because you want to be the nurse that the kindest, funniest, most cheerful and non-demanding patient in the world deserves, because really, truly, they all deserve that nurse. And if you really, deep down, honestly and sincerely want to be that nurse, then this could be the job for you and I wish you all the best. If you're mostly interested in just securing a steady paycheck and benefits, work in a grocery store because people always need food and the customers there almost never puke on you or ask you to change their poopy (adult!) diapers. Don't do this for money, honey. Is that the kind of person you'd want taking care of your loved ones? Good luck with your decision. p.s. go to a community college, talk to a counselor, and take a couple of career assessment tests. You might be pleasantly surprised, and the cost should be zero to very little.

What if they don't offer that? Like the smaller hospitals (Dubuis, Anderson) don't offer it, or at least they didn't offer it to me. Is it o.k. to ask for it?????????

oafzp4, it's already happened. State's been there a bunch of times, on complaints from patients and from patient families. And one time they were there the medical records manager was telling everybody they were only asking for records of people who died there. Scary.

Here's my best advice for your situation: You took the test, you did your best. Period. It's out of your hands now. Get on about your weekend, and don't even look in your mailbox until Monday. Really. It's gonna be what it's gonna be, when it's gonna be there, and you worrying about it isn't going to make it happen one single second faster. Be nice to yourself over the weekend, catch up with some friends, rent a movie, bake some bread. The news will come, and you will be fine. All the best to you.

If you're a new graduate, or new to an area (like I am in St. Louis), how can you realistically go about learning about a hospital's reputation within the medical community? I'm not talking about the paid advertising or the "top 100 hospitals according to such-and-such magazine" ratings. Those are bought and paid for. I'm talking about how nurses feel about different hospitals. I mean, come on, we all know the good ones and the bad ones, but if you're new, how do you find out? In St. Louis, I know Barnes is the biggest, but does that make it the best? St. Luke's was in the paper yesterday for a prosecuting attorney suing it because his wife died there, but does that make it bad? I mean, people die in hospitals, and the hospitals get sued, every day, right? And what about the littler hospitals, like Duibuis or Anderson? How do you know beFORE you get stuck working someplace how the nurses really feel about it? Anybody???

I know this is a really old thread, but I'm new to this site and really hope you're checking back once in a while. I worked at Dubuis (or, as we called it, "Dubious", because the care is really of dubious quality!) St. Louis and it is truly a hellhole. The hospitalists are fine, and most of the specialist physicians are good, but the ones that aren't are real a*holes but nobody does anything about them - they're abusive to staff but no one says anything so they get away with it. Almost all of the nursing staff is agency, and mostly they have CNAs and techs, very few RNs. What the other posters said about the pharmacy is, unfortunately, true. They leave at 3p and that's it. But the worst thing about the whole place is the administration. There have been at least FOUR different administrators over the last three years, and there's no ADON, just a DON with some kind of brain disorder - for real. And the head honcho chick is just evil. She is about as scary as it gets, and I think she likes it that way. If you don't suck up to her you are history. The state has been onsite investigating them - something like six or eight times in 2008 - and there have been some very serious allegations made by patients and patient family members. It is not a good place to work, in my opinion. Turnover is very high, and like I said, mostly they have to use agency. I think their reputation is so bad in St. Louis now that if you go there, it's like you must be a bad nurse or why else would you end up there?