A.Robins

Now reaching my 5 years in the NHS I get 37 days, which works out as 277.5 hours a year including bank holiday time back.

I definitely like to know if the child or the parents are difficult, because as others have said it gives me a chance to go in and try to calm things or find a way that works, if possible.

For my paeds patients we have advanced care plans that state exactly what circumstances we can and can't intervene, and what interventions we allow. A lot of them will say you can bag the child, but you can't intubate, or they want treatment if it's something reversible, such as choking or a treatable chest infection. Is that different to the way things are done over there?

In terms of the money, it is expensive to live in London and the suburbs around it, but it's not impossible. I'm a band 5 nurse, splitting rent equally with my brother, in a VERY nice complex in greater London, and it's not really a struggle at all.

NHS. They often cancel any bank nurses booked in if numbers are low, but the regular staff just stay, even if it means only having 1 or 2 patients each. Some charge nurses try to let someone go home early if they can, but not often the case. I do have coworkers who used to work in private hospitals, and they did have the problem of being cancelled as regular staff if they didn't have enough patients.

We only flush our ports with heparin when deaccessing within the inpatient setting, otherwise it's just saline flushes after meds or bloods.

My particular unit self rosters with a very small team, so some people tend to request weekends, or we all try to keep it fair. I tend to work 1-3 weekend shifts myself, depending on when my rugby games are. The general ward are just about to self roster and their nurses have been told they HAVE to work two weekends out of four.

Several of mine have been said, such as: - When certain charge nurses are taking the shift, and you know it means you will be trying to balance the drama on your own unit plus patients from general paeds no matter how good their own staffing is. - You walk on to increased noise and no-one visible by the nurses' station. - You don't even make it to handover before being told to just go straight to your part of the unit and get nurse to nurse handover instead. - Handover starts late.

I play rugby for a local team and am looking at going back to ballet class once I can find something that fits with my erratic work schedule (was a dance student once upon a time and miss it every day). I like to travel, but am so useless with my money I don't often achieve it. I have been to New York and Rome since graduating 3 years ago though.

I'm salaried (NHS in England) but we quite often end up staying late/missing some of or all of breaks to make sure charting/patient care/handover is achieved, and that has been on all three inpatient units I've worked on. It's something we have pointed out recently for my current job, as management is now trying to make us do extra shifts because they say our normal shifts don't add up to enough hours, but we just get told we have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it's not just our bad time management or they won't take it off our owed hours.

To be fair, my hospital does have a policy that says my hair has to be natural colours, and I still dyed mine pink. I slowly pushed the limits though, dying it a pretty bright red which is a normal colour around here, although not natural, and then covering that with pink so I had dark pink hair, and then when I bleached it I ended up with paler pinky red, and kept bleaching until I was blonde. Then when I was blonde I dyed my hair pastel pink on my days off with a colour that should wash out, and it didn't wash out completely, so my hair was very pale pink at work, and my manager didn't really care at all. I did bleach it back to blonde within a few weeks though. I'm with you on not seeing why it should be unprofessional, but accept that some people do think it is, and that those people could affect things enough it probably isn't worth it. I don't know how long your hair is, but maybe you could dip dye the ends and then just tuck them out of the way when your hair is up for work?

It depends on the job. I hated my first hospital after qualifying, so I was glad to do mostly 8 hour shifts with 12 hour nights or the occasional 12 hour day surgery shift because it meant my time there was in manageable chunks. I also liked the crossover between early and late shift because it meant for around an hour and a half there were almost two shifts worth of nurses around and you weren't rushing nurse to nurse handover. 12 hour shifts at my current job give me better chances of having my weekends to myself, make it easier to book off what I need, and work better for arranging deliveries and repairs, etc though. If I lived further than my current 10 minutes to work I might be less enthused.

After I had to take a couple of weeks out of student placement for depression related to a history of it and the added pressures of my brother being evaluated for bipolar and only feeling able to talk to me about how he felt. "Are your parents disappointed to have two children with mental health issues?" From my mentor. I was so shocked I just answered no, and that they were supportive and left it at that. My friends were fuming when they heard about it though. That woman was hard on me about everything and was the one who brought up the idea I might need time off because she was worried about me being so down beforehand, so I think it was more her being tactless than deliberately mean maybe.

First of all OP, I'm sorry you're going through that. I know being a new nurse is hard enough without people trying to undermine your confidence even more. The best advice I've read on this thread is to remain professional, despite how tempting it may be sometimes to roll your eyes at their behaviour (which I am guilty of doing sometimes once I turn away and can't be seen by anyone). Work with the technicians the best you can, asking them to help you while taking control of the situation, fostering a team attitude from your side, forcing them to either show how ****** they are when you are being professional, or start playing as more of a team player themselves. Don't fold and give in to their behaviour, but don't get aggressive yourself. Second (having struck a sore point), there is nothing I hate more than this idea that new nurses should just suck it up and accept being belittled, or the idea that everyone has to earn respect initially. Earning back respect when you let someone down, maybe, but everyone unless proven otherwise should be afforded a basic level of respect in the vein of treating others as you'd like to be treated. We need to move away from this culture of nurses or coworkers eating their young. Yes, being a new nurse is hard, and to some extent that is a case of just grinning and bearing it, but it shouldn't be hard because of your coworkers MAKING it hard.

To my amputee teenaged sarcoma patient: "Let's just cover your legs again. *pause as I realise what I said* Leg." Then I shut up. Luckily she had an awesome sense of humour right to the end, but I was definitely blushing and kicking myself.