Another post about how stupid my work is!

So I am fully getting over the gastro by Tuesday, so I call work and ask the policy on gastro, she replies, you need to be 48hrs symptom free, I say, well I had diarrhoea today so you better count me out for Thursday, she says, what shift are you working? I reply, Thursday afternoon, she replies, well you should call us on Thursday morning and let us know if you are going to be at work. Err... HELLLOOOOO... I just freaking told you I am still getting symptoms and it is less than 48hrs until I am sposed to be at work again... just put me on sick leave!!! Argh! So I called back the next afternoon and told em I was sick with gastro and she said, oh fine and marked me off sick for yesterday afternoons shift.

I get to work this afternoon, not feeling fantastic, but much better than I had been and guess what? I am in charge again! BLEH! I am in charge with... 1 RN from Zimbabwe who is still getting used to things in this country, 1 new grad (first year out RN) 1 RN who at least 3 people warned me is no good at the job and told me I need to go through and check all his work and me! and two EN's who can do obs and patient care but no pills or iv's or such. Sheeeeeet. I get through hand over and they warn me I should give the incompetant RN a light load, no acute patients, so I divide it up as best as I can and try to give him mostly non acute patients. I had no time to be able to go through and check his work anyways without making it really obvious that he is incompetant, and why should I have to shoulder that load anyways, if he is not able to handle the job he should not be put on an acute ward and he should be either reeducated or put somewhere with no acute beds. it is not fair to ask staff to cover for someone who is unable to pull their weight, I understand we are understaffed a lot of the time, I understand we need to reeducate them so that they are competant and able to work independently, but if that is the case they(being the nurses board where we are all registered or the hospital) need to get on and reeducate them now, they need to make allowances so that they can work supervised and they need to not leave them working unsafely on the wards for goodness sakes. It puts a higher workload on already overloaded and overworked staff. As it is, we have 8 patients to 1 RN and an EN a lot of nights, it is too much, especially if you have a couple of quite sick patients in that load. Tonight I divided my side of the ward with the new grad RN and an EN, we had at least 2 sick patients, had to insert an indwelling catheter into one of my patients to measure her urine output hourly (taught the new grad how to do it by making her do it ehee), already had two other ladies on hourly urine measures and one other woman with 2hrly nasogastric aspirates (she had a bowel obstruction and we were draining the stuff from her tummy out because her bowels were so blocked up it was starting to backflow). That was not including the 2 new admissions we had, the multiple IV antibiotics we had, plus all the regular pills and narcotics to give out.
I can hear those of you reading this trying to put a good slant on things... "Wow, you dealt with that well, no one died, you got all the meds done and you managed to get things done as well as supervising others." Bleh is all I can say to you! I suck at being in charge and I hate doing it... damn that 5 yrs experience I have hahahahhaa.
Ok going to bed now that I have ranted enough.
Laters all.

posted by BJ @   0 Comments