What to do?!?

Nurses New Nurse

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I am a new grad and I've been working on a step down cardiac unit for 5 months now and it's a horrible environment to work in. It's an unsafe environment to work in also. We are forced to take over our max of patients so we end up with 5-6 critical pts on cardiac drips and have to spend half of our shift looking for cardiac monitors to safely monitor our pts on the drips and we can't receive labs on our floor we have to go to a different floor to get them an we are way way understaffed....anyway I have planned to get out because I worked too hard for my license to lose them like this. I have an option to go to an icu or a med/surg floor at a different hospital but this floor has scared me from the hospital environment. Is this they type of environment I will be working in everywhere? I'm just so scared to get into another job I'm going to be miserable in

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Can you go to the other prospective hospital and ask some of the nurses what their patient load is like?

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Hospitals can be different. I worked at a hospital on med-surg where it wasn't uncommon to have 20 patients. I went to another dept-same thing-way too short-staffed to feel safe. I went to another hospital and pt ratio half or less. Still too many in my opinion but better. If I were you, I'd visit that hospital and walk around. Notice how busy, stressed out, or friendly everyone seems. ICU would be stressful due to the acuity but you shouldn't have more than two patients. Med-Surg is a crap shoot with how many patients you'll have but you can pretty much guarantee it will be more than you like.

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Where I work, step-down means 3 or 4 patients. I would worry about carrying a 5-6 patient load. If this amount of patients is a long-term problem,(ask the nurses who have been there awhile), then you will want to look for an escape plan.

First, stay in your job while you look around at what else is available out there. Never quit impulsively or you will find yourself getting desperate for money and grabbing the first available job, which might leave you worse off. Find out what you can about these jobs at the other hospital. What are their nurse patient ratios? Is there a lot of turnover?

Don't let one bad job scare you away from the hospital. The jobs are seldom easy, and being a new grad makes all work that much harder, give it a try elsewhere if things do not improve.

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