MaryB7

I have worked at around 20 hospitals now and I can tell you that you may never find a facility where you get equitable treatment. Many managers are poorly trained, have no interpersonal skills, were burned-out as bedside nurses, or just are there for the money. As a less experienced nurse, you may not understand that many shifts are just a matter of surviving while trying to provide the best patient care that you are capable of. I have spent weeks in a PAPR with no breaks and no real assigned unit. I have worked travel assignments that were advertised as a PCU job, but I floated every shift. Until you are the one making the decisions, you have to either be the best nurse you can be where you’re at or seek employment elsewhere. There really isn’t much else. No matter what, be a lifelong learner. Be the best caregiver you can be. Treat your patients like you would want to be treated if that were you laying in that bed. Educate your patients to the best of your ability. I recently wrote a paper that showed that 25% of Afib patients couldn’t explain what Afib was and only 9% of all of those patients understood what their prescribed anticoagulants were for. Do you think those patients will be safe when they are discharged?

I was permanent staff at a hospital in Texas for many years. I was floated the entire Spring of 2014. I took it as a hint. I left and started travel nursing. Now it is seven years later. I contracted COVID and was out for a month. The malaise and weakness I have experienced following COVID were intense. I was out a total of three months. After being off work, travel agencies did not want to work with me. I interviewed at several hospitals and kept getting passed over. In 2 of those cases I discovered that managers had hired young nurses with no experience right out of college. I have a total of 10 years of cardiac and Neuro-trauma experience, working in multiple hospitals across the country and new grads were deemed more qualified than me. I took that as a hint as well. My message to you is, you may not be able to or want to fight the system where you are at. You may be deemed as difficult to work with for questioning their system. After being denied employment, I returned to school to obtain my Masters degree. That is my current occupation. I saved my money while traveling. Looking back now, my advice to you is to determine if you can be happy on one of the units that is constantly short. Make friends with the nurse manager there. Transfer there. They may have a strange float policy, they may be taking advantage of you. If they are allowed to take advantage of you, do you really want to be there? If this is a strange float policy and for some reason you feel the specialty on this unit is where you were meant to be, stick it out. Otherwise, get out of there and go someplace where you will be happy.

This comment makes me want to move to the UK. And yes, who our society values and pays is so screwed up it is completely beyond belief.

I am former military as well, a travel nurse, and I’m old. We didn’t get any respect at the end of the Vietnam era. In fact it was quite the opposite. If you flew in uniform as you were required to do in those days, you risked being spat on or chastised. Yesterday, for the first time ever, someone thanked me for my service as a nurse. I nearly fell backwards. I too didn’t know how to respond....I was so completely surprised. I just said “Thank You” back as I was grateful someone acknowledged that my job is difficult at times. I will take those thank you’s from the public as an acknowledgement of that.

All of the nurses I have ever worked with that were CNAs first were great nurses. You have already been exposed to so much already, if you still want to be a nurse after seeing what the job is really about you will be successful. Congratulations to you.

I worked as a cleanup person at a facility that trained dogs. And yes, it was as bad as it sounds. What was worse was that I had previously worked as an electronic tech making 4 times the money but at the time this was all I could find. When you get hungry you will take anything. I cleaned poop and pee up after dogs. Little did I realize when I entered nursing school that this was a primer for some of my duties as a nurse. The dogs were grateful at least. Though I do get a buzz after I have diagnosed and gotten orders to help someone's condition, or I just finished working a successful code. Or a patient just says thank you for their care.