emmjayy

Covid combined with the way hospitals are run has made me hate nursing. I hate feeling like I exist to get taken advantage of. I am currently looking for a non-bedside job and as soon as I can leave, I will.... and I have no plans to ever come back. Good job, healthcare, you took a relatively new nurse and in 3 years' time, you burned her out to the point that she never wants to work in a hospital again!

I just applied for a nurse case manager position at an insurance company, dealing with worker's compensation cases. I am not totally clear on what this kind of job entails, but applied because it's a remote position and I have a solid administration/legal background to draw on from my career before I became a nurse. I'm just looking to hear from any nurses who do this kind of work - stress level, what your day typically looks like, and what would raise red flags for you in this kind of work environment. Thanks!

Deleted b/c it's not worth the fight.

Yiiiiikes. I remember having wicked high levels of anxiety about taking the NCLEX and now seeing people's testing dates getting pushed and testing centers being closed? I'd say y'all deserve a shorter/easier NCLEX just for the pure stress you are being put through! You've worked so hard to get through nursing school just for this final hurdle to be in a state of flux ?

There's certainly irresponsible sharing of statistics and models, with no context given to the numbers and sensationalized language throughout. For example, my local paper breathlessly reported two days ago "grim forecasts" from the Gates Foundation stating that by April 8, we would have 25,000 people needing to be hospitalized with COVID in NYS, and "only 13,000 hospital beds will be available." As of today, April 8, we have less than 4,000 people hospitalized with COVID! Statewide! Give me an *** break. Additionally, I've seen a shift happening to obscure how underwhelming the reports of new cases and deaths are... in the beginning the news was reporting things like "5 new cases a day! 10 new cases a day!" and now are reporting new cases and deaths in percentages.... "Today, we have 75% more hospitalizations in {COUNTY} than we had 3 weeks ago." No kidding! We had 3 hospitalizations 3 weeks ago and now we have 25? STOP THE PRESSES, the apocalypse is here! Just... puh-lease. We all know that the average person consuming these panic-inducing reports isn't going to do the math or contextualize the numbers, they're just going to panic. It's irresponsible. It's the equivalent of screaming fire in a crowded movie theatre, and it should be illegal.

So basically, the hours you work on your project each week count as your clinical hours. Honestly, I don't know of anyone who could possibly spend 10 hours per week working on these project components LOL, but I just said that that's what I spent and no one had a problem with it. I probably did spend 10 hours per week total stressing out and worrying over all of it! DON'T WORRY about the ISP. Just copy and paste the "learning objectives" that you think match each project and put an estimate of how many hours you will work on each component. Just make sure the hours add up to 100 and make sense compared to the size of each project. Hint - the weeks you do literature reviews really are quite time-consuming. You're not alone in your feelings about week 1.... I actually cried in frustration at least twice during that week. And I am the type of person who very easily understands assignments and has never had issues in school! That ISP is complete garbage imo, but just muddle through as best you can. The professors tend to grade very forgivingly, and my professor in the capstone course agreed with all of our complaints and basically gave my class a pass on the ISP because even she was confused by it.

So.... I was laid off from my job in an elective procedural area a few weeks ago (I'm in NYS, for perspective). I was told at the time that we were going to get a massive surge of patients and that I would be redeployed back to the ICU from whence I came (I just left the ICU within the past couple of months). Cool, I don't mind temporarily going back to help with a national public health emergency. The days went by, the cases in my county ticked up at a glacially slow pace, as of today we have a whopping 350 cases in a county of half a million people. We have had 5 deaths. Our hospitals are bleeding money, the hospital I am based at is like a ghost town. We had 12 patients in our COVID ICU this weekend, 4 of whom transferred to a regular COVID floor because they were doing better. Our number of new cases is dropping daily. Statewide, the same thing is happening. The only hospitals that are swamped are those in the NYC area, and let's be real - those hospitals are a zoo to start with, given that NYC doesn't have enough hospitals to care for its population even on a good day. Meanwhile, we have our governor essentially fear-mongering about this. We have him seizing ventilators and considering DRAFTING healthcare workers to go work wearing trashbags as protection in NYC. We have people calling the cops on their neighbors for letting their kids play outside together, and snitching on those businesses that are trying to remain open to pay the bills and keep their employees from becoming jobless. This economy was due for a correction, sure, but this isn't a correction - this is a government-created crapfest that needs to end immediately. The media has VERY irresponsibly invoked panic in the general population, refusing to focus on the fact that the vast majority of known infected people recover without requiring hospitalization. Instead, we get news article after news article obscuring details - "27 year old, healthy man dies of COVID!" when said man was MORBIDLY obese. Or, "Healthy grandfather dies of COVID!" then admitting later in the article that healthy grandpa had "a few" underlying conditions. Cut the crap. In the words of FDR - "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

WOW!! Sorry to everyone who asked me a question directly and I did not respond to - things have been kind of crazy over here, I switched jobs, then got switched back to work COVID ICU... just very hectic. I will try to answer folks now though ? @TnG33 - I would 100% recommend GCU over Capella. Based on comparing experiences between myself and co-workers in Capella, GCU is way easier in terms of weekly posting requirements, etc. The nursing school I went to was affiliated with the hospital I currently work at, and the school/GCU had an agreement that my nursing school would push their students towards GCU for their BSN, and GCU would accept my hospital as a clinical site. Not sure how it works for folks who don't have this arrangement. For the preceptor, you just need an RN with a BSN to sign off on your work a couple of times. I asked a friend to do it for me. It was not a big time commitment for her at all. I worked full time during my entire BSN degree and had no trouble at all with it. Are you being required to perform an actual clinical experience such as you did while getting your ASN? I never had to do practicum hours in the "real world," I just counted the time I spent working on the course each week as practicum hours and said I did 10 hours per week for the 10 weeks. For my scholarly activity, I attended a meeting of a committee I was already on. I based my project on that committee's purpose (in-hospital resuscitation events). That way, the scholarly activity tied in to my final report. But really, you could attend grand rounds at your hospital, Schwartz Rounds, or just show up to any committee meeting and write about it - it doesn't have to relate to your research project. The scholarly activity was a very short assignment and I got it done in week 2 even though the write up was not due until Week 9 or 10. Yes, you still have DQ assignments every week regardless of if you did the scholarly activity that week.

Basically just organize as much as you can at the start and make sure you are very clear on what is due each week. And follow the rubrics exactly in order to get A's on all your assignments. There is a 10 week journal to complete that is due in the last week, stay on top of that. You need to attend a "scholarly activity" and do a write-up on it, which is due in the final week - I did that very early on so my last week was fairly chill because I already had all the assignments done! Basically the course revolves around writing a research paper that is due in week 9, and each week you take one step towards the paper - a PICOT statement paper one week, a literature evaluation the next, a literature review, etc. The nice thing is that you can use your previous work to build your final paper. The course walks you through the steps you need to take to branch out and conduct/present your own research in your career. It's nice practice, but tedious haha.

They did! I am officially finished with school! Happy, happy day :)

Cross your fingers for me..... I apparently screwed up and didn't submit some B.S. documentation in the appropriate folder with one day to go in the class and no option to re-submit.... so am now waiting on tenterhooks to find out if I am going to be allowed to graduate. I'm so angry and upset and worried about it all. Thought I was going to be done, but now may be facing 10 more weeks of nonsense and another $1.5k for tuition for a class that I have successfully completed everything on, just accidentally clicked the wrong button and uploaded the wrong file into the wrong place.

I don't know how to upload my sheet, but I like to know drips, lines, drains, vent settings, diet (usually a tube feed), skin issues, Tmax, blood sugar frequency, rhythm, lung sounds for previous nurse, last neuro assessment findings of previous nurse, and a space for ALL the labs (ABG's, CBC, CMP, ICA, coags, and other randoms like lactic acid, troponins, pro-BNP, etc.) - and multiple columns so I can trend the labs on my sheet instead of having to log in to the computer and look back to trend them. I keep the back blank to write down the patient's PMH/HPI/24 hr events, and imaging (date, type of imaging, results). I usually just write all this stuff down at the start of the shift and then never refer to it again but it does help cement it in my brain and gives me a starting point for when I report to the next shift (e.g., at the start of my shift the patient was on 50 of propofol and 15 of levophed, I got the prop down to 10 and the levo is now off). It's really a matter of what works for you though. If you are coming from med-surg, you probably already have a system that works that will just need a bit of tweaking. At the beginning you will be very dependent on your report sheet though and may even want to have one with boxes for each hour so you can annotate meds that are due, labs that need to be drawn, things that need to be assessed, etc. I also used an hourly box method to write down hourly I&O's/temps/blood sugars/etc. when I didn't have time to log in and chart them in the moment.

This student was on their very final clinical placement, for which this school of nursing does not require a clinical instructor's physical presence. They come up periodically during the week to see how the student has been doing, but it's an experience where the student is assigned to a nurse, follows their schedules/assignments, and perform nursing skills under the one nurse's direction. It's seen as a stepping stone to new grad orientation. Many students complain that they need their phones to look up information, but all the computers have Micromedex, UptoDate, and Google very easily available.... not sure what your phone can offer that's better than all of that. Also, I constantly see them scrolling through Instagram, which is not going to give them any trustworthy information about pathophysiology, medications, how to manage lines, compatibility of drips, etc. and have literally never seen a student using Epocrates or any other medical education app. So the "Oh, I need it to look things up" excuse is a crock IMO. I got through school without my phone with no issues, graduated in 2018 so it wasn't that long ago! Like I said... I absolutely love a receptive student. I had one a few months ago who helped me tremendously with my very unstable patient whose belly surgery had gone bad and she had more questions for me than I knew how to keep up with. My day went more slowly than I'm used to but it was okay because I could see her learning. Be that student :)

I've had mixed experiences with the students I've gotten. Very rarely do I get a student that I enjoy and get to teach things to. Most of the time they are just lazy and on their phones constantly. I hate that and I will give any student who does that a really hard time (recently told one that she had the option of putting her phone away and learning, or exiting to the locker room until she could tear herself away from her phone while I wrote her clinical instructor an email about her behavior). I'm an ICU nurse so it's like... hello, come learn about this incredibly unstable patient that I am attempting to fix because I KNOW you've never seen anything like this before. I find that a lot of students in the ICU are "code-chasers" and don't really care to learn about what it takes to prevent someone from coding... they just want to do CPR. I love to teach about drips, EKG's, lines, pathophysiology, how to correlate lab values to patient's symptoms/meds, etc., but I hate it when I am all geared up and ready to teach and the student just sits there texting or scrolling through Instagram because the patient isn't actively coding.

Heck no, you should not work extra if you don't want to. I have been a nurse for 1 1/2 years and can count the number of times I've picked up extra shifts/overtime on one hand. I speak up about schedule abnormalities too, and absolutely refuse to be screwed over when it comes to holidays, being scheduled for shifts that I wasn't hired to work on, etc.. As a result, I am just as happy with my schedule as very senior staff are, while my peers are miserable and angry all the time. However, they let themselves be screwed over by management and never speak up for themselves, so they will continue to be taken advantage of until they realize their worth and go to bat for themselves. There is NO REASON for you to work when you don't want to and NO REASON for you to be constantly shafted when it comes to scheduling, either. Speak up for yourself and don't feel bad at all. This is just a job, friend. If you died tomorrow they'd have someone else to replace you within a week, so don't burn yourself out for a job where you are entirely replaceable!