NayRN

This is an interesting topic-and one I am considering for a masters thesis. I think it could be a really awful thing if meds such as benzos or narcs aren't provided and prisoners go into withdrawals in jail, among other ethical issues. Anyone else have anything to add? Because I'd really like to hear...

I think complete bed rest for a DVT was going down the tubes when I was on the floor, too. I dunno. Kinda miss floor nursing sometimes. Sort of. Been away for 1.5 years now.

As far as the career path you should be on, I can't help you there. But if it makes you feel better, I am in Loyola's MJ in health law program and it is $1220 an hour. So feel happy about the $800! I about fell over when I saw the tuition!

In a lockbox in a locked cabinet or locked room would solve your double locking problem. As far as regs for med disposal and tracking go, I'd check your state regs. for what they want.

Yeah, I don't qualify for Obamacare subsidies-income is too low. I live in a state that didn't expand medicaid. But the good news is I am also exempt from it and from the penalty. Yay.

the hospital i used to work at used to bug me with this as well. we had c diff and mrsa patients going out to smoke. the thing is that you can educate until you turn purple, but a patient can claim that they were falsely imprisoned if you won't let them out of their room. you can't restrain them, you can't legally keep them in their room. there are a lot of legal issues with this one, but i tend to agree-the right of one patient to freedom of movement shouldn't trump everyone else's right to a clean environment.

Interesting pay situation-I suggest you go to your union, since you have that option. So many of us don't. They are also the ones who negotiated the pay. I worked med-surg/tele on a 40 bed unit for 4 years. Our patient ratio was 6 or 7:1, sometimes we got a separate charge nurse, sometimes not. On day shift we'd sometimes discharge all 7 and get a whole new team, for a daily load of 14 patients. I started as a new grad at $17.50/hr with a max raise of 2.5% per year. No union. I'm back in school now, hopefully on to bigger and better things.

So, I was sitting at the pharmacy yesterday waiting for my scrip to be filled, and a lady came up to ask a question. Lady: "My husband is supposed to take a baby aspirin every day, but all the ones I have found have saids in them. Do you have any without saids, because they say saids are bad for you." So I overhear this, and although I let the pharmacist field the answer to that one, my thoughts went from holy cow, and these are the people voting and reproducing to wow, we are really doing a crappy job educating these people if we can't get across that aspirin belongs to a class of drugs called NSAIDS and you can't have NSAID-free aspirin like you can have fat free pretzels. Then again, look at the media we are up against. I had a lengthy discussion with my mother in law recently because she was taking way too much ibuprofen because she heard that tylenol was bad for her. Patient education is so important, but does anyone else feel like it's really an insurmountable task to get patients to trust and listen to their nurses and docs more than they trust and listen to commercials for law firms? It took the pharmacist a second to figure out what the was actually talking about, (saids? oh, you mean N-S-A-I-D-S) and I'm not sure he did the best job explaining the issue to her (aspirin is an NSAID, you can't buy them without. The bad effects they are talking about is when NSAIDS like ibuprofen and Aleve are taken in large doses over long periods of time). Pretty sure the lady is going to go home without the NSAID-filled ASA (but I really need them without, my husband is so particular about what's in his medicine). Sigh.

My issue would be that a nurse is probably acting outside their scope of practice if they are giving medical advice to patients.

When I did my home health rotation the nurse I rounded with didn't even wear scrubs for safety reasons. In some of the neighborhoods he visited home health personnel wearing scrubs had been robbed at gunpoint by people looking for drugs. Logo on the car would be just as bad, HIPAA violation aside.

Generally speaking, unemployment benefits are only available to those who were fired without cause. Like in a layoff or downsizing situation. If you were fired with cause, your employer can dispute your unemployment claim. File and see what happens.

I have been fired twice. The first time I had a complaint, it was a patient who was extremely unhappy about her clear liquid diet (so unhappy, in fact, that she threw her jello, in the dish, at my nurse manager when said manager heard her yelling from across the hallway and came to see what was wrong) but she really liked her dilaudid. Thank goodness I had seen this one coming and was very careful to give her prn meds very close to on time and document pain reassessments religiously. I also had the house sup start an IV so she could have the pleasure of meeting this patient and the charge nurse checked on her several times as well. So when she complained about my inattentiveness, it was a matter of going through the chart and looking at each and every time I had laid eyes on the patient. Plenty of notes, plenty of witnesses. I wrote a narrative to legal and included all of this info in it, and I never heard another thing about it. Moral of the story? Document everything. Use your resources. The second time, I was fired by a notorious nurse-firer. I actually did pretty well and made it until 10:00 on day 2. Other nurses made it mere hours. The wonderful family member of this wonderful patient threatened violence regularly and convincingly and it came to the point where we would never enter the room alone so that we always had a witness and/or backup, then it came to the point where we would have security enter with us every time. Which only delayed the percocet longer to give security time to get to the floor. I got a bit of satisfaction from that anyway! It was not too terribly long after this patient that I quit nursing. I have better things to do than deal with people like that.

Oh, not if you saw my Sallie Mae account you wouldn't! But thanks :)

I have a BS in business as well, so that was enough to get me into my grad program. It is not nursing specific. And yeah, to other comments: This was a pretty normal refund for me-I have received this much back for previous semesters, so I didn't think it was an over payment. Apparently since it was a 5 credit hour summer session instead of 6, I wasn't eligible for that much aid. You would think they could have figured it out since they didn't apply my financial aid or refund me until 3 weeks into the class. And yes, I spent it in less than a month-prepay the $800 in day care so I could do my 90 clinical hours, towing my truck back home and fixing it when my fuel pump gave out when I went to my first on campus day 100 miles away ($577), and paying a couple months rent and poof! $2300. I'd love to pay it back. Anybody want to give me a loan :)

I let nursing in October of 2012 after 4 years working med-surg. I was becoming burnt out and I tried to get another job, but after 5 interviews and a year and a half of putting in applications and still nothing, I lost my confidence and decided I needed to try something else before I either messed up at work or had a nervous breakdown. So I am now a stay at home mom of 4 and I just finished my BSN and started a grad program in health care law, so I've not been idle. I tried to go back to a nursing home last summer part time, but I made it through 3 days of orientation and realized that I had quit bedside nursing for a reason, and those reasons are still there. I do miss parts of it-the critical thinking parts, the education parts, and my coworkers, but when I really think of what the day-to-day was like on my floor, I don't regret quitting at all, and I don't anticipate going back to hospital-style bedside nursing ever. Maybe home health or hospice. I fell in love with public health and the legal aspect of health care, and I figure I can bring a unique skill set to a new career with my nursing training and legal training-not just a legal nurse consultant certificate, but actual legal training. Maybe risk management, board of nursing, health department or something else where I can work on the bigger picture. I'd like to solve some of the problems I saw with bedside nursing both with the nursing work environment and the patients by advocating for nurses and working on policy changes to make our communities healthier. I'm excited-I think it'll be great! Now, if I can just figure out how to make actual money in public service...maybe I'll end up working with lawyers on cases for a while and save the world in my spare time?!