So my career in nursing is very piecemealed. If I liked an institution I would end up having to quit for personal reasons (I.e one job was 65 miles from my husband, another could/would not accommodate the time I needed to go do fertility treatments....it is rather last minute when you know you have to leave so I get it, but a life without a child would have just been worthless for me.) And the other half of the time I quit because the job was asking to much from my life (Salaried but working 60 hours a week to do a good job, home care was great except for the non-ending nature of it.) Only one time in the last 13 years have I quit a position because I just couldn’t go back to even complete a two week notice due an unsafe work environment. I believe I am there again. I started this job 8 weeks ago and I’ve had 3 serious near miss incidents. No this place is so crappy that they wouldn’t even care if I didn’t fill out the IRIS report, but I do because that is the kind of person I am. I have given notice, but I’m not sure I can go another shift. I need the money until I find another position, but I could just throw up thinking about having to go to work tomorrow. I know that there really isn’t anything more to say (yes I have reported this place to state) but just knowing I’m not alone in this experience is helpful. Everyone at this job has been working this way so long that they don’t even see the danger in what they are doing anymore. It makes it very hard on the person doing the right thing when most of the responses from supervisor roles are, “I’ve worked way worse situations than this, and with less an orientation you’ve had.” (Which I highly doubt because I didn’t get an orientation but even so, just because one gets put in a situation that provides crappy care doesn’t mean that’s the standard we should be aiming for right? So for any of those that are young in nursing, here is my advice for knowing when you should quit a facility regardless of your lack of experience:
1) The orientation is hard to follow, lacks direction, and organization.
2) You are not even close to being out of your orientation period and the place tries to give you a team of your own (even if it is only 1-3 patients) due to short staffing.
3) People are angry with you for being slow and behind and asking how to do something you have been shown. The average adult learns and RETAINS 5 new things a day. There is no way you aren’t going to need to be shown things more than once....for at least a year.
4) Your orientation does not have a checklist of skills you need to demonstrate proficiency in with your preceptor. Or there is a list but no one takes the time to sign it, or ensure that the times were reviewed.
5) There is a sign on bonus. Take it, but don’t spend it so you can give it back if it isn’t safe.
6) Finally, if they are using contract nurses and none of them are renewing their contract, that is a big tale about how bad the culture there. Especially if 50% of their staff is contracted.
Good luck! Hope everyone has a better experience than I have had at this CHI St.Luke’s at Brazosport in Lake Jackson, TX. Don’t go there if you are traveling. Super scary. I had hired on as regular staff and moved for this position, just an unsafe and scary disaster waiting to happen there.
I got a $10,000 sign on bonus and signed a 2 year contract. I found out pretty early into it that they might be getting bought out by another company. In December they announced publicly that ownership would change in April. I barely made it to April and quit 2 weeks after the buyout. The contract was invalidated when they changed owners. Thanks for the $10,000. Better than nothing I guess.
Whenever ICU had a patient on anything that required 1:1 nursing care, they argued over who got to take the patient. "Look, I'm getting paid to sit and do nothing." And? How is that different than any other night you work? Because you don't have to do as much charting? Typing on a keyboard sure is exhausting, you deserve a break.
Specializes in Surgical Specialty Clinic - Ambulatory Care.
6 hours ago, LibraNurse27 said:
OMG was that the ratio?? I briefly worked at a CHI facility (7 months). All the red flags were there. Sign on bonus, moving bonus, tons of travelers/agency staff. We usually had 6-7 Med/Surg pts on days but they didn't seem like Med/Surg, more like Stepdown. ICU was always tripled so I think the house supervisor sent unstable pts to Med/Surg sometimes just to get them out of ER. One of mine arrived with a K of 7.8 after missing dialysis for 2 weeks and coded 5 mins after the ER nurses rolled her onto the unit.
Night shift was 7-9 pts. I had an 18 month contract and had to pay back my sign on bonus since I left before then. I did NOT care. I did put in my 2 weeks, and those last 6 shifts I just kept telling myself it was almost over. I wrote the check to return my sign on bonus and walked to the parking lot without even looking back at that place!! Sometimes I still think about it and how crazy it was there.
No, the ratio at CHI Brazosport was 1:6 BUT just like you said, it was more like 6 step down patients instead of medicine/surgical patients. A lot of scary things are getting missed. But when I told an NP working on the floor how the ratio was to high for the type of patients we were caring for, she’s the one who told me, “No, they coddle you guys up here. I worked a med Surg unit in Alabama that had ratios of 10-13:1 with bipaps, drips, etc. So you shouldn’t be complaining.” I wished I had thought of it at the time to say that just because she was tortured doesn’t make it right and that there is no way she was giving good care to those 13 people....which in my opinion is unacceptable.
Thanks for the responses. Other things that would clue in a new nurse on a job you should just run from. No two weeks notice needed. Just finish your shift and email your notice to the supervisor, save a copy, ensure that you put that your last day will be end of shift on whatever day you are turning it in.
1) Your director does not know the mission statement of the facility when asked about it by you during the interview process.
2) When you ask the supervisor and the director what they like most about working at the institution you are interviewing for the best answer they can come up with is, “It’s close to home.”
3) Other more senior staff who are orienting you tell you to not clean up your patients or do any ‘CNA’ work because “that’s their job.”
4) Your director acknowledges that the assignments are frequently heavy and actually tells you “sometimes it is so busy all you can do is put in a note about the shift at the end of the shift instead of doing all the charting.”
5) Anyone regularly doing questionable actions to get through the shift. For example at this CHI St. Luke’s Brazosport, there were several times that there were not enough working computers. So some nurses would take scanners off working computers, put them on computers at the desk, and scan patient labels and their medications this way after passing all their meds. Totally defeats the purpose of using a scanner to pass meds. And when you bring up the issue 1-10 times, it falls on deaf ears.
Don’t tolerate unethical behavior from your employer or your co-workers. That is how Derek Chauvin was able to murder George Lucas surrounded by witnesses and NO ONE did anything. Speak up, speak out, and do not be silent when this happens to you. It is unacceptable. I don’t care if there was a time when someone could safely take care of 13-15 med Surg patients....that is not today’s world and saying no to stupid is how lives are saved.
Did all this happen from the interview onward at this hospital? If so, why did you pack up and move when you were getting bad vibes in the first place? Not judging, just curious. Did you check them out on Glassdoor or Indeed to see what nursing reviews had to say?
Wrongway was national and while it was propped up by lots of probably bogus reviews outside of nursing, if you read the nursing reviews you were forewarned, across the country as well as my hospital specifically, especially the past couple years, when they really cut staffing to the bone. Nurses were vocal about the crappy conditions on the online reviews.
This is something I recommend to nurses to check out these reviews, specifically what nurses have to say. Many of the new grads didn't take the bonus and were glad when they left six months in! I'm just glad to be out of there, but also sad because it used to be one of the best little hospitals in the city and it was like family. All it took was Wrongway taking it over, laying off support staff, management and educators and bringing in a couple of their minions; and they have completely destroyed it in less than two years! Before we had a stable staff, after that at least 50% were travelers due to the mass exodus.
Hopefully you'll be able to find another job as Texas is booming. Wish you well! I hope the complaint to state improves things, but I think they will get away with it due to Corona, maybe they'll slap them with some fines. I was debating reporting to state over critical supply issues, but after my corporate compliance complaint was met with the Corona excuse I was disgusted. But they did at least start purchasing more tele packs and oxygen flow meters before I quit so my complaint must have had some effect.
Simply walked in, gave my letter of resignation to the supervisor and walked out. It had to be done.
If you do it, make sure you tell them you're leaving.
You keep it off your resume and move on.
Agree, two weeks notice is a courtesy. When they fire people they just walk them out the door with no notice, both peons and even CNO's! Most of us work at will, unless we work at a unionized facility which means we can leave at any time or they can fire us at any time unless it's for a protected legal reason such as race, sex or age. But as well all know people are fired on trumped up charges to disguise the real reason if they want! Age discrimination is one of the hardest to prove.
In addition to the recommendations made in the original post, I also suggest not going into work the next day and consider changing positions if you have a shift that makes you burst into tears.
As others have suggested, I would submit my resignation effectively immediately and leave ASAP. Next, polish your resume (omitting this employer) and apply for unemployment. Although you need the money, being implicated in a lawsuit or having to defend your license will cost much more in the end. I've been in situations similar to this and it's often a frog in the pot scenario; the staff become so inured to the unsafe conditions that they lose sight of their gravity and potential bad outcomes. Best of luck
They are getting paid $50/hr to chart, pretend like they actually went into the room. You go in to the room to do your assessment and all of the drips are just about empty, it was obviously too much work to even call pharmacy and say hey, could you send us another levophed, nimbex, and versed drip for Mr. Smith in ICU? They are almost empty. You already know what lies ahead. These nurses have reputations. You pull the covers back to look at their legs and your patient is covered in stool from head to toe. If you aren't going to change the diprivan tubing the least you can do is pull the sticker off that I put on almost 24 hours ago when I did change it. Their mouth is drier than a popcorn fart, their lips are cracked and bleeding, and you can tell by the odor and the fact that flies are landing on their tongue that oral care definitely wasn't done at 0600 as charted. The foley bag looks like a basketball, you check tube feeding residuals and there is almost 1400 ml, and the tube feeding is only running at 30 ml/hr. You turn your patient and find sharps laying in the bed. Instead of disconnecting an antibiotic that has finished infusing long before you got there and flushing the line, they just shut the pump off and left the tubing connected. Now the lumen won't flush at all, and the piggyback you need to run isn't compatible with any of their drips. The trashes are full, the linen bag is full, the room is a mess and the family called to check on the patient and wanted you to know they are on their way up and will be there in 15 minutes. The unit clerk got floated to the floor to sit with a suicidal patient, everybody in the ICU is tripled, and your other 2 patients look just as bad if not worse. You barely survive the shift, go home and pass out instantly, and you return in the morning and get report from the same nurse who wants you to know that you "forgot to chart that you did foley care on one of the patients." Sound about right?
I've been considering getting back into the ICU after a little while away, and WOW your post was dead-on...you described my last ICU job so exactly and brought back so many things I had forgotten. It's like you were watching over my shoulder. Great descriptive skills. And yes, I may still go back to ICU because I'm crazy, and I love it in spite of all those things, but you definitely lay it out just like it is!
Be sure to email your resignation via your personal email so you will have access to it. At another hospital, I emailed my resignation in October. They did not take me out of the system till April. When I realized I was still considered an employee in April, I called my supervisor on the phone to ask her why was a I still an employee. She promptly fired me for incompetence, and it went on my record. I called HR to report this, but they hung up on me. I did have a printout of my resignation email, but did not sue them because I was still visiting the site as the employee of a contractor and an ugly situation would affect my current job. I believe there is a higher power and what goes around comes around.
Yup to the red flag warnings. I just lived through this nightmare, and I finally resigned my position—only for my employer to make my resignation effective today rather than in 2 weeks. Unbelievable. I almost want to quit nursing altogether after this experience. Nightengale was about people, not productivity and profit. The whole thing sickens me. Bouncing between relieved and sickened. Just. Ugh.
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Covidnursedropout
56 Posts
I got a $10,000 sign on bonus and signed a 2 year contract. I found out pretty early into it that they might be getting bought out by another company. In December they announced publicly that ownership would change in April. I barely made it to April and quit 2 weeks after the buyout. The contract was invalidated when they changed owners. Thanks for the $10,000. Better than nothing I guess.