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I'm pretty sure you can go anywhere once you have some experience under your belt. My aunt has been a nurse for over 30 years and according to her it doesn't matter where the experience comes from as long as it's experience. You might have to take baby-steps to get to where you want to be, though. Depending on the hospital they may want you to work med-surge before they will place you in other units but I would apply to the OB units anyway, the worst they can say is no!

The only way I could ever see this as justifiable is if your company has a policy to not hire it's own patients. But to not hire someone due to a disability is not right...

It depends on what you need to learn before the test. Kaplan is useful for people who have the content down but need more practice with test taking. Hurst is better for people who need more content. (I did both.) Neither is better than the other and the both helped in their own way but my problem was not the content or the questions, it was my anxiety. I needed help with that in order to pass. Kaplan was very useful, though, when doing priority-based questions.

Good luck! :)

Be patient. It took me a few months to finally get an interview. Apply everywhere and don't be picky. Right off the bat everyone is looking for people with experience and you don't have that yet. Get a job where you can and stick it out for a year then go on to places you're more interested in. Keep your chin up and Good luck! :)

Unfortunately it is necessary. I have to do this daily and I'm not even in a hospital, I'm in LTC. You want to catch s/sx of infection as soon as possible. You need to know if a wound becomes open again, if they are bleeding, inflamed or puss-filled. These symptoms aren't just going to wait for morning to appear. And, frankly, it's your job. It may not be convenient for the patient or for you but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that your patient is safe and that means making sure their incisions and wounds are safe. Health care doesn't just stop because the sun went down.

Mandated flu vaccines and smoking are not comparable. Flu vaccines are to prevent the spread of the flu to the residents and other staff. My smoking off campus does not affect my patients or other staff.

My favorite nurse to work with is an elderly gentleman. He's former military and after that he worked for GM. When GM crashed a few years ago he took up nursing. He's in his 70s now and been nursing for at least 10 years. He's great! It's never to late (and there's never a wrong gender) to become a nurse :)

Our CNAs have been reporting a mouse in our facility for months now but no one else ever saw it so no one believed them (these two specifically complain a lot and aren't known to be the most honest about their complaints and some of their stories were pretty unbelievable). Well then one night I was standing in the hall talking to my CNAs and on the corner of my eye I saw something move. I look down and there was a little grey mouse sitting there staring up at me. After a brief moment of staring eachother down it scurried off into a resident's bedroom never to be seen again. ._. I was mortified. Not because I saw a mouse (I think they're adorable little pests) but because it was IN A RESIDENT'S ROOM!!! Still haven't seen the pest guys and it's been weeks!

I'm a BSN graduate... it took me 8 months to find a job even WITH a BSN.

To be honest I never wanted to be a nurse. Ever. In my wildest dreams, never. I never wanted to do patient care, I never wanted to deal with bodily fluids, medications or the responsibilities of keeping people alive. I don't deal well with stress and clinical anxiety has been a problem my entire life so nursing just wasn't for me. I became a CNA out of necessity because I desperately needed money for bills and food, the necessities. My first job was at a rehabilitation center for people with TBIs (traumatic brain injuries.) Working there I discovered I actually liked helping people with their daily needs. This did not mean I wanted to be a nurse, yet, but it started the wheels turning. I had a few experiences at this facility that upset me with their nursing staff. The poor care and clear disrespect for their clients and family members was atrocious. All I kept thinking was that these people need better care! They shouldn't be treated like aliens just because they don't "act right." This is what finally drove me to being a nurse. I wanted to be that person that people could come to for help when every one else looked at them as "other." I wanted to be the nurse who actually pays attention to her residents and responded to the concerns of her CNAs. I just kept thinking, "How would I feel if I were that TBI resident?" and it made me sad to think of how lonely and belittling they were being treated. :/ Long story short, I became a nurse in order to care for people who weren't getting cared for.

This would be wonderful! Especially for new grads (not unlike myself). We all need support systems whether we're new or experienced. Anxiety is HUGE in nursing and one of the best ways to help with it is to talk with other people who feel it as well. :)

I understand having to call other departments. I do it all the time in LTC but I also understand that those departments get busy and backed up as well. Orders don't always get turned in properly or with proper notice and things slip through the cracks so we, as nurses, are responsible for making sure that our patients come first. We make sure that everything gets done even if it's not our department. Yes, it's frustrating, but someone has to do it and it certainly isn't going to be the doctor. Every department gets busy and sometimes they get behind and forget things just like we do (example: giving meds to 20+ residents and forgetting the pain pill one resident asked for an hour ago). I can empathize with the other departments... That said, I am tired of actually following up and STILL getting blamed with something going wrong. When we are about to run out of a medication I always re-order it through pharmacy. If it doesn't come the next night I check to make sure it was ordered and call the pharmacy to follow-up. And yet even after doing these things I am somehow STILL at fault when the medication runs out and the new meds haven't come in. I can't magically make medications appear no matter how hard I focus my brain power.

I've been working at an LTC facility for approximately 6 months now. I have only been a nurse for... approximately 1 year and I came from home care to this facility. Over the past few weeks there have been an increasing amount of complaints brought to my charge nurse from the oncoming shift (days, as I work nights) about me. At first I was really worried. I was thinking "if you have a problem with everyone else, you are probably the problem." But then, after a while, I began to notice a pattern in the "problems" they were having with me. None of these "problems" had anything to do with the job I was doing. For example, one nurse complained that I was wearing a sweater on my midnight shift. Every single person (nurse, CNA, even the charge nurse herself) was wearing sweaters on the midnight shift. The building is cold, your body temperature lowers midway through the shift due to circadian rhythm and it's winter... and it's michigan. I couldn't understand why they would complain about me wearing a knitted, non-print, solid-color sweater when my co-workers were wearing hoodies and labeled shirt (against company policy, btw.) Another complained that I left my bag and my coat out when there were no lockers left in the staff room to put my things in. Yet another one was complaining that I always rush through shift report like I really just want to leave... Now this might SOUND like a legitimate reason to complain, but in reality this nurse was on her cell-phone texting people while I was trying to give her report. I got to the point where I told her, flat out, to put her phone down and stop being rude. She always would talk to other people on her shift in the middle of my report, as if she doesn't have the entire shift to say hello to them. I'm not the only one going through this. Another nurse who started shortly after me is going through the same stuff. She made a mistake her first time doing MARs and changing them over to the new month (everything is on paper at this facility so we have to write out medication lists from month to month.) She got in trouble for this and was super upset about it. The following month our charge nurse sends her a text and says "we need to talk." So my friend was freaking out wondering what she did wrong this time. She was brought into the office and berated about making more mistakes on the new MARs for the new month. She was furious now. She had purposefully NOT done the MARs this month because she was terrified of making another mistake. In other words, because she had made a mistake before, they automatically blamed her for someone else's mistake without even looking to see who the one who did the MARs actually was (which would not have been hard to do considering we have to sign the new MARs at the bottom of eat page.) The other night the charge nurse ranted at me about the day shift saying I had left medications out AGAIN. Let me back up a bit here. At our facility we get nightly visits from a medication company that packages and delivers bubble packs of our clients medications and it it night-shifts job to put them away in a timely manner... so anyways. I was upset to the point of tears. I told her I had never left meds out. When they came in I put them away if I had time, if not I put them into the medication room (which is locked) to be sorted out when there was time to do so, but I would never leave them out for anyone to grab. The first incident she borught up was when she had to come in on an afternoon shift and put away meds that "I" had left out. No, I told her, the meds came in late that night and I was in the middle of med pass so I put them in the med room. When dayshift got there the day shift nurse offered to put them away for me so that I could leave for an appointment. I ASSUMED he would, indeed, put them away as those meds were for his residents. I had assumed incorrectly. Lesson learned, I will not rely on other nurses ever again. The second incident she spoke of, and the one that invoked her rant, was from my last night at work. I told her I didn't even know the meds were there. I saw the med guy leave and talked to him for a minute as he walked out the door and then went back to my med pass. He had never said anything about leaving any meds and I didn't see any when I got back to the nursing station. Luckily I ranted to a fellow coworker about this and she realized that SHE was the one he had left the medications with and told the charge nurse just that. No one decided they wanted to apologize. No one decided to pass it on that it wasn't my fault, they just ignored the situation and moved on. I'm so sick of this bullying crap! Just because I'm new doesn't, by any means, make me stupid or incapable. I know I don't know everything, which is why I constantly ask questions, why is this treated as inexcusable? Every time I or my friend ask a question we're treated as if the answer should be blatantly obvious and we're stupid for not knowing it. Every mistake we make is brought up over and over and over again and there's nothing we can say or do about it. It got to the point where I had to stop in the DON's office and tel her I'm done. I listed off the complaints to her, acknowledged the ones that were legitimate but told her I'm sick of the ones that aren't. She told me I can't those things get to me and that nurses eating their young is in every facility and it would eat me alive if I don't just "let it go." My response to her was as follows, "Nurses eating their young is like chinese water torture. You're slowly feeling more and more pain from it with every drip." Every unnecessary or uncalled for complaint shoots my confidence and makes me afraid to ask the questions that I really need answers, for fear of appearing stupid to everyone else around me. Why is this even a thing? Why do people with 10+ years of experience act like a new grad should know everything they know? Why do they feel like I, as a new grad, should know how to handle every situation that pops up right off the bat? Did they forget how it was to be new themselves? I'm sorry for ranting, I'm just at my wits end here. I'm tired of being the punching bag around here and I'm at the point where I'm ready to tell them to shove it and find someone else to take my place. I've already created a new resume and am waiting for my one-year to come up to apply for a position in a different facility. I love my residents, I love my CNAs but I just can't stand the a lot of the other nurses and the fact that management does absolutely nothing about their behavior. They practically foster this sort of behavior. This place is already understaffed and has a high turn over rate with new nurses. I don't know what to do anymore... I'm not going to stop asking questions even if someone else thinks it's stupid. I'm not going to put my residents in danger because of lofty of hostile co-workers. I am NOT going to loose my license because I was too afraid to ask someone with more experience for help...

I know you probably have preferences as to what yu want to do, but if you can't find a job why not search for other things like LTC? There's tons of jobs out there for nurses in long term care settings because new grads seem to think it's "not for them." It's a good paying job line and stable at that. You learn a lot from your job and you deal with all kinds of people. Look outside the box. Don't just apply to places that look appealing. Anything you can get your foot into will help you find the job you want later on down the road. As for "good" LTC facilities, you want to look for one that needs help and provides you with enough hours and the benefits you absolutely need. Make sure the facility you apply to has nursing as more than a "desk job." The first facility I worked for I was basically just a secretary with an RN title. I sat at a desk in a small office and did paperwork all day and occasionally had to respond to falls or illnesses. The current place I work for I am doing everything from documenting to responding to emergency situations like strokes, heart attacks and sudden unexpected deaths. I have anywhere from 24-60 residents at any given time (unfortunately due to under staffing) and it really teaches you how to time-manage!