Pros
Schedule Flexibility Large Hospital System Lots of Hours if you like Overtime Ability to move around Worked here a long time, many different floors. It’s hard to review the system as a whole considering it’s so large. We’re talking it literally feels like your unit is a state, but the system is a country. Especially now considering we’ve merged.
Cons
Patient Care Ratios Hourly Rate Floor Managers Care, but Upper Administration doesn't. I’ve had nothing but great experiences on all of my units. Managers for the most part are helpful and will do what they can to improve your experience on the unit. However, upper management seems to care about nothing but the bottom line…money. Patient care ratios are going up, as a med surg nurse for most of my years I typically expect 5 patients to be a baseline and end up with 6 by noon. Night shift it isn’t uncommon to have 7. The extra workload would be more manageable if every single other discipline wasn’t SEVERELY UNDERSTAFFED! I spend most of my days functioning as a part time care coordinator. Respiratory Staff is nonexistent, many of them have left. Physical therapy staff is abysmal, most of them have left. We don’t even have enough environmental staff to get rooms cleaned on time or properly. I just feel that I end up spending all of my day worrying about everything else when the focus needs to be on patient care, especially when understaffed. Also, there seems to be this growing trend of patient families coming in just to raise hell for the staff and all the things we’re not doing as a system to treat their family like royalty. I want to post a big sign outside the hospitals that states “If you’re not coming for a friendly visit or to help, get out” All of this…just so upper administration can tell you they like to pay you EXACTLY in the middle of market value. Extra care needs extra compensation.