Why would a long-term care facility require 2 years of experience?

I seriously think HR puts down 2 years experience for literally any job. I think they do it to weed out people, ignore it and apply anyway! My job said i needed 2 years RN experience and 1 ICU and i applied anyway and now here i am lol

I tend to agree. I work in a SNF- LTC/Rehab. Assessing, charting, and medicating 30 sub-acute patient of all types and ages with multiple comorbidities, with more scripts than CVS, requires more skills than 4 nurses possess. We have 2 per shift.

Thank God I was an EMT in another life because I've had 3 people circling the drain due to various reasons that had to be sent back to the hospital they came from as 'stable'. Sometimes LTC is more reminiscence of battle field triage with all of the casualties and none of the help of a modern hospital offers.

I've had patients with drug seeking behavior being self medicated by family after I already hit them with Roxy, a violent dementia patient who almost broke the wrist of another nurse (we have no standing orders to chemically restrain) and a CVA who refuses thicken liquids but constantly aspirates everything.

We also have a problem with the life safety system alarms going off at random times through out the night waking everyone up. A gas leak threatened to close the facility and took 3 hours to resolve after the fire department and maintenance showed up 3 hours later. Security walked out one night and left all of the external doors unsecured for all of our exit seekers to find. All of this occurred in one month.

Please, tell me more of this non-complex LTC land of unicorns and rainbows, of which you speak, because it must be somewhere over the rainbow from where I work.

And perhaps they wanted experienced nurses. LTC/LTAC isn't the no-brainer that people often think it is. It's a tough specialty, in more ways than one.

LTC and LTAC are two completely different tough specialties -- long term acute care having more in common with stepdown/progressive care than with long term care, or even with med-surg.

That said I agree completely. Perhaps this facility actually wants expert nurses caring for its residents? I don't know, I've had several elderly relatives who needed long term care, and I appreciated that the floors weren't staffed full of novices.

Plus, most LTCs don't have the ability to offer long orientation periods -- a few shifts, maybe. So it would behoove them to hire nurses who can practice independantly once learning the basics of that particular facility.

I think that since they are offering a bonus, they are in desperate need for nurses. They probably do not have the resources to train a new graduate. The add itself is offering a bonus, they want experienced people is my suspicion.

There is no "nursing shortage" so they would prefer to hire experienced nurses. As for "big bonuses" I worked at a job that promised "new people" a big bonus. Unfortunately, every single one of these "new people" never actually received any kind of bonus. They all complained that they were all promised a "big bonus" but it never actually happened that anyone received the bonus.

experienced nurses have....more experience:sarcastic:

Some LTCs are more like sub acute care....faster paced, more time management needs, clinically complex residents. It takes time for newer nurses to be trained.