Brewer,RN

Wow that is a good deal, almost unheard of. Are you in an at-will state or a union state? Are you a staff nurse, or in a hard position to fill? 4 weeks required notice seems a little high, but I guess it depends on where you work. Everyplace I've ever worked requires 2 weeks for staff, and 4 weeks for upper management. I do tend to give a month's notice for jobs I like, and only 2 weeks for jobs I can't stand.

I started as a new grad in Amarillo several years ago at $20/hr base pay. In cities with multiple nursing schools dishing out hundreds of new grads each semester, new grad labor is cheap. Everyone at my nursing school I talked with after graduation started out at the same rate regardless of the hospital they were working at and experience they had (including my friend with 15 years EMS experience). Houston on the other hand is a different story. It is currently the highest paying city for nurses, and like HouTX said, Eagle Lake has to compete with Houston, so they have to raise their prices if they want to retain nurses. You should very well be able to get a a new grad rate at $22/hr base pay. Whether you will get a higher pay because of your certifications, it's doubtful, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for a higher rate. You will certainly be more marketable and more likely to fill a new position than a GN with no experience and no certifications.

Very few people want to work nights. It's very hard on the body especially considering night workers get on average 1-2 hours less sleep than regular workers. Not to mention the risk for heart disease and certain cancers increases the longer you work nights. Some prefer though, like my brother who has been an ED night nurse for 10 years. Many dayshift nurses I've worked with in the past will complain that nights are so easy, and that night shift nurses get paid way more, and that the job must be so great. Yet when a night position becomes available, they don't apply for it. "Oh I can't I have kids" or "Oh I can't I'm in school." or "" Yet I have worked with countless nightshift nurses that have children, are in school, and work second jobs. People don't want to work nights, because deep down inside they know that shift work is really hard and it sucks. So yes, to answer your question, night positions are in higher demand because they are harder to fill. You will definitely make yourself more marketable if you include your willingness to work nights on your resume. Same concept applies to weekends.

You can't be worried about what the nurse manager thinks, you've got to look out for yourself first and do what's best for you because nobody else will. I don't care how sweet or nice the manager is to all the nurses, she is looking out for the organization first, and the nurses second. She has to answer to upper management. If they tell her to lay-off 15 nurses, that's exactly what she's gonna do. It doesn't matter if they have families, are sick and on chemotherapy, or simply just need the money. I've seen it happen before. The nurse manager knows if she doesn't perform well for upper management she will get the can instead, and I've never met a nurse manager that will take the fall for a staff nurse...

This is a hypothetical question, as it hasn't happened to me, but has anyone been fired after they gave written resignation and notice to their employer? If so, did it count against you as far as your eligibility for rehire? Does your old employer consider that you left voluntarily in good standing, or that you left before fulfilling your notice? This situation is bound to have happened to someone somewhere before. How horrible would it be if you gave your employer a 30 day notice to be nice and professional, and on your last day they fired you just to be jerks? Or they told you not to come back your last week and then tell HR that you left without giving notice? As horrible as it sounds, I'm sure this practice happens in places. I worked with a nurse who gave two weeks notice at the hospital and the manager told him he didn't have to work his last 3 days. Whether or not they counted it against his eligibility for rehire, I don't know, I never had contact with him after he left. I know when I quit and gave my two weeks notice they kept me on the schedule for the full two weeks.

Like the others said, to be professional you would write your name, position resigning from, expected last date of employment, and then the token "thanks for allowing me to be part of the blank organization etc. " In an at-will states with no unions, which I live in, you are NOT required to give any reason whatsoever. You are not even required to give 2 weeks notice. You can technically just put "I quit", and really you don't even have to tell them you quit. I did that with a horrible job when I was a kid. Got so fed up with it, that I never showed up again. Definitely wasn't professional of me, but I was 16 at the time and couldn't care less. Wouldn't do that today though. I've seen new grads come in on their first day, spend their whole shift crying, and then were never heard from again. Did they quit and never come back, or did they immediately transfer to another dept? I don't know. But they sure as hell didn't work two weeks in the unit. You always want to be professional and never give an employer a reason to badmouth you, no matter how horrible your last two weeks are. And yes I've worked in places where I have been hazed and harassed by management during my last two weeks and wanted to just not show up the next day. And yes the laws technically don't allow past employers to discuss anything other than your job history and your eligibility for rehire, but in a lot of places, especially smaller cities, many directors, administrators, hiring managers etc. know each other and bump elbows all the time at the same conferences. And it's not like police officers or detectives are following them around making sure they don't tell other employers about you. The world of health care is a smaller world than many people realize.

Let me start off by saying I started a new job last year at a freestanding outpatient surgery center. The position I applied for was a full-time nights staff nurse position. What I do is take care of the patients that stay overnight for 23 hour observation (mostly ob/gyn hysterectomies) and go home in the morning. I am the only RN at night, I have a nurse tech who also works with me. We are the only two people in the entire building at night (of course we can call IT, administration, security, physicians etc. if there's any problems) If there's more than 4 patients staying overnight we call in an agency nurse to work with us, and I make patient assignments and make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. Sometimes the agency nurses clash with me because they don't like the assignment, or have specific times when they want to take their lunch break when I am busy dealing with a patient's urgent issue etc. The agency nurses argue that I am not their supervisor, therefore have no authority over them. I can't tell them which patients to take, when to take their lunch break, tell them to get off the computer etc. My nurse tech companion (who has worked here for several years) says that I AM the charge nurse because I'm in charge of all the patients and the entire building at night. I had never really considered it until now since the position I applied for was just a staff nurse position, but would you guys consider me to be the charge nurse? Would I be able to put that on my resume for future jobs? Should I be getting paid the measly $1/hr charge differential? I have been a nurse for less than 5 years and have only ever done staff nursing, so I am just curious. Any opinions or comments would be appreciated. :) Oh and as far as the agency nurses go, I talked to my director about them and told her I can't have people on my team that aren't going to work with me, and she agreed not to let those specific nurses come back. Since then we've had a couple of really good ones.

Wow sounds like there are some issues with them. Would company would you experienced case managers suggest instead of UH?

Just out of curiosity does anyone ever do traveling assignments as a case manager? I'm interested in getting into public health CM and also interested in traveling, and was wondering if it's possible to do both at the same time.

There's nothing unethical about making money helping people. Hospitals are businesses too. If they don't make a profit, they shut down. Then there's no healthcare for anybody, not to mention millions of health care workers out of a job.

I always see people saying that for-profit = hell and non-profit = heaven. I've worked at a non-profit and for-profit health care facilities in the last 5 years, and I've been at a for-profit that had the same problems that everyone complains of about non-profit. Pay freezes, low wages, old equipment, under-staffing, high turnover rate, etc. It depends on each facility. There are good and bad in both. So unless you are planning on working in the business/executive team aspect of the hospital, it shouldn't really matter to you as a nurse in the end what happens to the money. Though I do wonder that if I worked for a public for-profit place like HCA and bought stock in them, would I be more motivated to work harder since I was a partial owner of the company?

That's why I'm filling out applications before I move in July. If I don't have a job lined up by then I'm not moving. I just want to know a pay range from actual nurses (not just salary websites that may inflate or deflate pay based on external influences) so I'll know whether or not my wage requirement will be taken seriously. In the town I live in right now, there's hardly any competition as far as both nurses and hospitals go, and requesting $26/hr would probably make the manager fall out of their chair laughing before they threw the application in the trash.

Putting in applications in the Austin area hospitals, anyone recommend any good apartment complexes?

I've been thinking about moving to Austin in the next few months and I've been updating my resume and filling out applications, but I'm not sure what to ask for as far as wage requirements. I currently live in a small city and make $20.42/hr, but cost of living is fairly low. I know one person who I went to nursing school with who says he makes $26.50/hr base pay, but he is also 20 years older than me and has a 15 year EMS record. Is $26/hr base pay too much to ask for? How much do nurses make in Texas base pay? P.S. I have an ADN and 2 years ICU experience.

I had applied to school last semester and was accepted, but unable to attend mandatory orientation so I wasn't able to register for classes. Now I have to reapply for admission and they are using Nursing CAS in addition to their regular application (which is lengthy). Complete pain in the @ss!! Hope I can get the application finished before the deadline.