WARNING: Long Rant Ahead
I’m not sure exactly when it was that I started to hate my job. Over the last few months, it has gotten harder and harder for me to go into work, and harder still to maintain a positive attitude once I’m there.
Don't get me wrong, I still like WHAT I do for a living, and am still sure that I made the right career move. Lately however, I’m not too sure that I like WHERE I work. I’m now more convinced than ever that I need to make a change.
Although it is hard to identify the straw the broke the proverbial camel’s back, I can list a few of the straws in the pack:
Maybe it was the day that a nursing assistant’s baby daddy showed up in the parking lot with a gun, and the DON called ME to see if I could go and see what was going on. (Fortunately, I had already left the building for the day and wasn’t trapped there while the facility was locked down for 2 hours.)
Maybe it was the day that the DON stood at the nurses station and loudly proclaimed that “None of you nurses are passing your medication! There are too many boxes of pills in the med carts!” (Even though we had been telling her for months that the pharmacy we use was over delivering medication, and probably over billing for it too. But no, we were the incompetent ones, not the pharmacy.)
Could it have been the day I found the rock of crack wrapped in a dollar bill in the middle of a hallway? Or the bag of weed in a patient’s room? Or the day the IV patient with a history of drug abuse became irate because her nurse wouldn’t give her a dilaudid injection through her PICC line? (For those who don’t know, a PICC line is a catheter for IV meds that runs directly into a major vein. Putting dilaudid in it fast would get you really high, really fast.)
Or, maybe it’s the fact that most of our nursing assistants seem to think it’s OK to drop the f-bomb in every sentence, and have gang tattoos up their necks, and think it’s OK to be 10-30 minutes late every day. (Then I’m the one who gets criticized when I have to rearrange the daily assignment list to make sure that there are enough aides to care for the patients.)
Perhaps it the fact that the nursing assistants are allowed to be openly insubordinate to us nurses (their supervisors) but the minute we try to actually BE managers (like the DON says we should) the nursing assistant go crying to the DON who then comes to us and berates us for being “Nasty and rude” to the staff. (Um.. asking them to clean up a resident that has soiled themselves, NOW instead of "After I take my break" is rude? Huh. News to me...)
Is it the fact that I haven't had a regular schedule in the 3 years I have been working there, and that I never get my monthly schedule until nearly the first of the month, making it impossible to plan any further ahead than 3 weeks at a time? (The person that does the scheduling says it’s impossible to do a set schedule, even though everyone knows it can be done. The problem is that SHE can’t figure out how to do it.)
There are those that will tell me that these are problems that I might find at any facility. But I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that the people managing the facility I work at are really all that concerned, and in fact spend more time barricaded in their offices than they do paying attention to what is going on in the rest of the building. (As long as the beds are full and the money is coming in, they really don't seem to care about much else.)
All of these things are contributing to my dissatisfaction with my job. It’s a struggle to go in every day, a struggle to stay focused and positive, and a struggle to maintain a professional attitude with the staff, residents and families.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve started looking for a new job, putting in applications at a few other facilities, and have had a couple of interviews. I owe it to myself to see if there is a better place out there before I decide to get out of long term care all together.
