UT Southwestern (St.Paul)

ShirleyM · Mar 13, 2006

I worked at Zale Lipshy for 3 yrs, including the first 8 months that St.Paul and Zale went under the UTSW umbrella. I did Zale's O.R internship program and worked 2 yrs afterwards. Which internship are you looking at?

RN34TX · Mar 13, 2006

I worked in med/surg for them for one year as an LVN. That was several years ago, but at that time, they were definitely one of the best paying hospitals in Dallas. I made $22/hour as a staff LVN.

They definitely put Parkland to shame pay wise, who wanted to pay me $19/hr as a new grad RN with all of my LVN experience!

Anyway, St. Paul started as a dream job. They merged with Zale and advertised great staffing ratios in the Dallas Morning News.

It was truely heaven at first. I had no more than 4 patients, and there were always 3-4 CNA/PCT's on the floor who bathed and changed beds on every one of my patients. Some even drew blood for my patients.

Then they started running out of money. At the end of my year before I finally quit, I was taking up to 8 patients and expected to do total care and bathe 4-5 of them myself as we then went down to only having one CNA/PCT for the entire unit. We also basically lost our charge nurse as well as he/she was now expected to take a full load of patients in addition to charging.

It wasn't uncommon for me to receive telemetry patients on my non-monitored med/surg unit. If tele was full, they would send them to us completely unmonitored just to empty out the ER. It was very unsafe. I was expected to keep them until a tele bed opened up.

The computer charting was lengthy and very time consuming. My shifts were 7a-7p but I often ended up staying past 9-10 pm and I was still one of the first day shift people to clock out each day.

Prior to this job, I rarely had to stay past my normal shift unless a patient coded or something unusual happened.

I was only scheduled 72 hours per pay period but easily put in 80 just from staying late night after night.

Things could have changed since then, and the ICU's and other units may be a different experience so keep that in mind. But nonetheless, stay away from their med/surg floors because it ended up being one of the worst, most stressful places, I've ever worked.

The great pay I received there as a staff LVN came with a big price.