eggyweggy

Our management took chairs out of our breakroom and offered up a few other spaces for meals, but the other spaces don't have a fridge/microwave/etc so people don't like to use them. I avoid the other options too -- I don't want to heat up my lunch in one space and then have to walk through the unit with it. So, I try to take my lunch around 1100. On almost every unit I've ever worked, this seems to be a low traffic time because most people prefer to eat at 1200 or 1300. If management wants people to be compliant with social distancing during breaks, they need to provide appropriate space for it. It's not reasonable to deny people breaks, limit breaks, or mandate breaks to occur at inconvenient times like lunch at 0830. Ironically, my covid+ unit has had the fewest staff cases for any of the inpatient units in my hospital. A bunch of people have been out on quarantine for medium-risk exposure from sharing breakroom space with them, but there haven't actually been any staff-to-staff transmissions on my unit.

My coffee breath is enough to make me vomit in my mask. Staying hydrated helps and so does chewing minty gum. I notice my breath less when I try to breathe more through my nose. I think the constant moist environment also promotes bacteria growth on my mask itself - changing out the mask helps, but the real culprit is my dry mouth. Think about why we all have morning breath after a full night’s sleep - I’m usually parched when I wake up in the morning.

I love nursing and the opportunities I have had over the years. I hate how covid has flipped my job upside down and made it generally intolerable. I can’t stand the fear-based decision-making that is being done by people who sit at desks all day. I can’t stand the lack of evidence-based practices. I’m tired of providing a lower standard of care to covid patients because people are scared. I was probably a little burnt out in my current job before covid, but this pandemic has pushed me over the edge into straight-up job loathing. The only thing keeping me where I am is my paycheck. I feel trapped because I suspect that any other bedside nursing job probably has the same frustrations. I feel like all I do is complain about how absurd things are. In any other circumstances, I would use this energy to push for change. With covid, I feel powerless. I’m passively looking for other jobs in other areas of nursing to combat my current state of burnout.

My hospital requires them at all times on any patient care unit, regardless of what kind of patient you are providing care for. Honestly, I was a lot more diligent about hand washing, not touching the front of my mask, and cleaning my face shield when it was part of my routine to exit each room and not something that was expected to stay on at all times. I’ve noticed that wearing a mask all the time has made me lazy about meticulous mask hygiene since it’s basically just part of my face now. Pre-universal masking, I never would have pulled it under my chin or let to dangle on the side of my face. We aren’t required to clean our face shields unless visibly soiled or when removing it. So, mine gets cleaned far less but I’m still following protocol. I think the face shields when not providing patient care are overkill. If I’m wearing a mask, my coworker is wearing a mask, and neither one of us is coughing or hacking and we are also maintaining as much distance as possible, we shouldn’t need the face shields too. It honestly makes it more difficult to do my job (gives me a headache trying to read the computer through the foggy plastic), makes my face hot and sweaty and probably ruins the integrity of my mask. So maybe that’s why I have to wear it? Nobody believes for a hot minute that my single-use surgical mask is still containing my droplets 8 hours into my shift. :shrug:

Adjunct clinical teaching is a great way to test the waters and see if you enjoy teaching with a relatively short commitment. I work 0.9 FTE at my primary job and teach clinical one day per week. It works out to about 44 hours a week, but my primary job is a mix of 8's and 12's so I still get 2 days off per week most weeks.

IV insertion and drawing blood, especially when I can get a difficult patient on the first stick.

As someone working on a covid+ unit, I'm not in a huge hurry to resume my social life as my state begins opening up again. I worry that I could be one of those asymptomatic carriers despite using PPE each time I enter a patient room, even though nobody else in my family has had any symptoms. I would feel much more comfortable resuming some semblance of a normal life if a) we had the capacity to test everyone working with covid+ patients on a regular and frequent basis and b) if we had a more consistent and reliable treatment plan for patients with COVID-19. Until that happens, I would feel more comfortable keeping my circle extremely small. My husband, on the other hand, is an enormous extrovert who hasn't been able to work (in-home sales) for the past two months and he is chomping at the bit to get together with our close friends. I'm content to maintain connections with my friends via text, zoom, phone or email. He craves the in-person contact and really struggles with these alternate forms of socialization. I want to wait a little bit longer before we start having friends over or sharing food and drinks in close quarters as prolonged, close contact appears to be one of the main modes of transmission.

I'm really on the fence with this one. I fully support any private business (or public facility for that matter) who requires people to wear a facial covering in order to enter. I see it as an extension of no shirt, no shoes, no service. If I prefer to shop commando, then I may be limited to wear I can shop and that's a consequence of my choice not to comply with mask-wearing. There are workarounds for those who truly do not wish to ever wear a mask on their face in public, no matter how stylish the mask may be. While universal masking is full of good intention, the vast majority of people (including healthcare workers!!) are not wearing masks correctly. Anecdotally speaking for myself only, I see people in public adjusting their masks ALL THE TIME or lifting it off their face in order to talk to someone. At work, people are constantly pulling them down under their chin so they can breathe, drink, or eat - essentially turning their mask into a crumb and drip-catcher. Does wearing a homemade mask protect me? Doubtful. Does wearing a mask help protect others? Maybe. Does wearing a mask hurt me? No. Does wearing a mask hurt others? No. Will I mask up while I'm out shopping? Sure. But since I know that my stylish fabric mask will do little to actually protect me from COVID-19, I'm going to rely on the old faithful tactic of washing my hands and not touching my face.

Choosing to put your health and the health of your loved ones ahead of your career is something that nobody should be judged for. It is a very personal decision and the amount of acceptable risk is highly variable for every single person working in healthcare. Fact of the matter is, we are all replaceable in our employer's eyes. The ICU will continue to operate with or without you. If you leave the bedside, someone else will fill your shoes. It is ultimately the responsibility of management to ensure that units are adequately staffed - if the unit suffers because someone leaves, that's on management. Not on the person who left the unit. Truth is, most employers are not providing a truly safe work environment for anyone working with COVID patients. There will be many who choose to accept these less than ideal working conditions and accept the increased personal risk under the guise "This is what we signed up for." There will be others who are only willing to accept the increased personal risk if their pay is also increased. And there will be still others who determine that the risk is not worth any amount of hazard pay. Choosing to leave a high risk area is not being cowardly at all. It's about respecting your boundaries and knowing what level of risk is too much for you and your loved ones.

It sounds to me like this job wasn't the best fit for you and the way they treated you during this pandemic was your dealbreaker. There is absolutely no shame in quitting a job when you do not believe that your employer can keep you safe. I admire that you took the leap to quit this job over this - as a profession, nurses have a tendency to accept substandard working conditions because we put our patients before oursevles. I have to admit that if my personal financial situation were different, I would quit my job too. I no longer feel that my employer is providing me with adequate protection to do my job and I am not getting evidence-backed reassurance that our current practices are safe. I had been feeling somewhat unfulfilled in my job for other unrelated reasons, this is likely going to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back for me and I will likely move on once other non-covid nursing jobs are posted again unless things change for the better. There are many other types of nursing jobs out there, though you may struggle to find something as the nursing job market has changed suddenly and drastically. I see nothing wrong with taking a break from it for a little bit to recover and process what happened.

Just because your skills and area of expertise aren't needed now doesn't mean that you won't be needed in the future. If everyone rushed to the front lines at the same time, there would be nobody left to take care of patients who are being neglected while the focus is on Covid-19.

I just finished the flexpath program in nursing education. I found it to be an economical and efficient way to get my MSN as I was able to complete the program in less than a year at an affordable price. I had to bust my buns to do it, though. I liked the flexible deadlines and I loved that there were no group projects or mandatory discussion board posts. I feel like I learned quite a bit from the assessments but it required a lot of independent learning. I didn’t interact much with online faculty during the program except for when they graded my assessments and that was pretty minimal. There is a course tutor (sort of like a TA) who is available to answer questions and clarify assessment questions. There were no friendships or relationships made during the program since it was all independent work. At the end of the day, employers seem more concerned that I have the degree and less concerned about where it came from. I do have some concerns about being able to get graduate credit for my Capella courses if I choose to enroll in a more traditional DNP or PhD program down the road, but I’m still undecided about whether this is something I even want to pursue. Getting the MSN for me felt equivalent to the hoop-jumping I did for RN-BSN. I was able to teach as an adjunct with just a BSN, but the MSN opens more doors for me in education. I lined up a clinical adjunct teaching position for the spring semester at a more reputable school than my last adjunct job. The pay is less than my hourly base pay at the hospital so I’m not sure that I’ll give up my bedside job for full-time academia any time soon. TLDR: Capella’s Flexpath was an efficient means to an end for me and nursing education is just my side hustle right now, not my main career.

Just in case you need another vote in favor of saying no without guilt, short staffing is the hospital's problem not yours. I only answer my phone if I'm interested in picking up extra hours during a given pay period. And I only pick up if it doesn't require jumping through any hoops on my end. Otherwise, I work the FTE that I was hired to work. Same with swapping shifts with co-workers. If it doesn't inconvenience me or result in a super-long stretch or a random day in the middle of my stretch of days off, I'm happy to swap equivalent shifts with my co-workers. But I definitely don't bend over backwards to do it. I feel absolutely no obligation to help cover shifts that aren't my responsibility to cover. it's management's responsibility to hire enough staff. Consistently picking up at the last minute enables poor staffing practices.

Thanks for the insight. The staffing was not ideal this particular evening. We had a mix of RN/LPN and two were floats from other units, so not ideal in terms of resource people for new nurses. I did ask some of the other staff and they were unable to help, so the charge nurse was really my best resource that night. We worked together again tonight (she wasn't charging) and she apologized to me for not being more helpful. I told her that I understood she was stressed and that I appreciated what she was able to do under the circumstances. It was an unusually busy night and her patient load was way heavy for a charge nurse. Charge nurse usually gets a lighter assignment so they can be more available. She was frustrated that nobody was offering to help out (which is something that she always does when not swamped and is a vey nice thing to do), but wasn't delegating any of her tasks either. So I think my takeaway is that I'll try to use her as my last resort when I can see that she is busier than usual. Knowing how stressed she was the other night, I helped her with a few things tonight and she was very appreciative of that. The charge nurse tonight was much more comfortable in the role and had time to help me troubleshoot a particular drainage system. She has a little bit more approachable personality and I'm sure that helped.

I'm still a fairly new nurse, about two years into my career. I've been at my current job for almost 3 months, off orientation for the last three weeks. Needless to say, I didn't encounter every single possible thing that I might need to know during my orientation period, so I still have quite a few questions for my more experienced coworkers when it comes to skills that i haven't done at our facility. The expectation is that if we are doing something for the first time (even after being off orientation), we will grab a more experienced coworker to talk us through the skill and sign us off on our competency checklist before we do it on our own. The majority of my co-workers are fantastic and more than happy to take a few minutes to help the newbies. There are quite a few of us on the unit who very recently came off orientation, so I get that it can be overwhelming sometimes if you're constantly being pulled away from your own patients to help someone else. The charge nurse who I was working with during this particular episode that has me feeling kinda crummy is a very nervous and easily frustrated individual. She doesn't handle unexpected very calmly and was tense and jumpy for the bulk of our shift the other night due to some staffing changes and some issues with a few of the patients on the unit. So she was already on edge before the shift even started. So a few nights ago, I had a patient pass away toward the end of my shift. I've dealt with this before in different facilities, but I was unfamiliar with the protocol for my current unit. It was an expected death, so I had just been providing comfort care for the patient until they quietly passed. After confirming absence of vital signs, I notified the charge nurse and told her that I would need help as this was my first time dealing with a patient death at our facility. I asked her where I could find the checklist for this (as I had seen one out on the unit another time, so I knew it existed) and she replied that it wasn't necessary, then rattled off an incomplete list of what needed to be done. She picked up the phone and called a few people to notify them of the event (without telling me who she was calling), and told me that I needed to wait for the MD to pronounce the death before we could do anything else. I again asked where I could find the list of tasks that needed to be completed and she replied with "For heaven's sake, haven't you ever dealt with a patient death before?" I said "Yes, but not at this facility. I know in general what needs to be done, but I don't know the protocol HERE." I know that she was having a stressful evening, but her lack of assistance made it very difficult for me to do my job properly. Thankfully the family was very understanding and patient when I honestly answered their questions about what would happen next with "I'm not sure exactly what the procedure is here because I'm still new to this unit, but I'll let you know as soon as I find out." Still, it was a lot of running back and forth because I was flying blind by the seat of my pants with so little assistance. I did eventually find the checklist that I had seen before, so that helped somewhat. But there were still things on the checklist that I was unfamiliar with, and when I tried to clarify those things with the charge nurse she gave me answers that were different from what was on the checklist. I simply did not feel confident that I was doing things correctly because of all of the conflicting information I was getting and I could tell that she was getting more and more stressed/irritated with each question I asked. I said "I'm sorry, I know you're really busy tonight and you don't have time for this, but I need to make sure that I'm doing this correctly. This is my first time dealing with this here." She threw up her hands, made a sigh of disgust, and walked away. OK, so that was mostly a vent session but I'll welcome any suggestions for dealing with a co-worker who doesn't want to answer questions from a newer nurse. Again, the majority of my co-workers are great and approachable if I need help. I could see where it would be bothersome if I was asking for help with things that I had done several times before, or asking for help with every single little thing. I try to utilize my own critical thinking skills before I bug someone, so I'm not asking questions every hour on the hour or because I'm too lazy to find the information on my own. After this experience with this particular charge nurse, I'm honestly a little afraid to approach her if I have other questions. It may just be that she is not a good resource when she's also doing charge duties, so maybe I'll make her my last resort from this point forward. I must be getting tougher because while it rattled me a little that she was rude to me, I didn't take it personally or as an indication that I was incompetent for not knowing exactly what to do the first time. Still, I'll take any feedback for how to handle people like this in the future.