Where do I begin?
The Pro listed above is a Con for any potential patient. If you have a choice, do not come here. There are no private rooms, so you may be sharing a dirty room with a psych patient that likes to paint the walls with bodily fluids. Since it's a small hospital, they will cohort ANY patients for the sake of bringing someone else up from the ER, even a dirty room with only new bed linens and the tables wiped down with Purell (no housekeeping at night). I've even seen them cohort a patient on Droplet precautions with a regular patient, at the Manager's request. Yeah. Infection control does not exist.
For employees:
1) Nobody will care about you. You will be short-staffed, receive minimal training even as a new grad, and be slammed with an unsafe load almost from day 1. Up to 10 med-surg/tele patients if they are really busy and they don't call anyone in to help. However, God forbid you forget to complete the smallest task. They will threaten to write you up-no qualms about it. CNAs also get slammed, complain (with good reason) and nothing gets done.
2) Management, if you can call it that, is inexperienced and ineffective. To their credit, they pretty much have no say in what happens on their respective floors. They are just there to put out fires, listen to everyone's complaints, and write people up. They are not given autonomy to make decisions without the approval of the CNO, who is so far removed from everything that goes on the floor, that I don't think she even knows the gravity of the situation.
3) Everything is dirty. We have to reuse BP cuffs used on pt's on contact isolation because disposable ones are "too expensive". They tell us to clean them with the disinfectant spray, but the cuffs are a porous cloth material and will never dry if we do that. So C-diff for all!! No housekeeping at night, so the nurses and CNAs have to "clean" the rooms. Yeah right. Also, the plasticware we give pt's to eat their meals is not individually wrapped. Individual spoons are stocked in a bin that everyone puts their dirty hands into. It's disgusting the things you find in there. Need a fork and knife to cut that chicken breast? Yeah, you'll have to call the kitchen for that. They'll bring it up to you in an hour, if they don't forget.
4) No place to eat, no nurse's lounge, and cafeteria closes ridiculously early, like 4 or 5pm. It's really embarrassing having to tell a pt's family member that. There is no space for anything.
5) No space to document during the day shift when there are 100 residents and medical students crowding the computers. And since we're just nurses, who cares. They tell us to document on the computers in the patients' rooms, but these computers rarely function. Even if they did, whoever decided on the place to permanently affix the workstations must've been 4 ft tall. If you stand, the computer is too low. If you sit, the computer is too high. Absolutely no planning goes into anything they do at this place.
6) Favoritism runs rampant. The "special" nurses that whine and complain only get 5 stable, oriented pts, while everyone else gets stuck with 7-8 in varying conditions. There is also a major disparity in the way nurses and most importantly, PATIENTS, are treated on the different med-surg floors. They admittedly send the new and lazy staff members to one floor, then wonder why that floor has more issues. Hmmmmm well, doesn't take a genius to figure that one out. They expect magnet-level service with close to zero resources. Can't have it all.
7) Residents residents everywhere! Most of them are lost in this world. Poor things. It's really unsafe.
8) Everyone is so LOUD!! They just don't understand that people are sick, sleeping, and 10 feet away. They all come to the nurse's station to talk, scream down the hall, and have no regard for patients' comfort. If you tell them something, they get offended.
I would be here until the end of eternity if I kept writing. If you're a new nurse and nobody else will hire you, go ahead and apply. Work here for a year until another hospital picks you up. That's what I did, and that's what most do.
