Nurse Jobs London

Monday I received a call from the nurse manager of the Chest Pain Unit in the City Up The Road. We talked a bit and she wanted to know how soon I could start I told her I *thought* I could start Oct. 29, which was the following Monday, but if not, I could definitely come on board the Monday after. I immediately e-mailed my recruiter, and she called me right back, saying she’d already heard from the hospital, and she could get me there by the 29th. Since then, it’s been non-stop e-mails, one FedEx delivery, multiple faxes, phone calls, and more e-mails! Today I stopped just short of saying, “Hon, why don’t you just get YM and save us all this trouble?” But it looks like I will indeed be starting there on Monday. Packing is not a huge deal, as I barely unpacked last time, and the fact that it’s just about an hour from here means I can actually make multiple trips to retrieve anything I might need. I’ll have to do the extended stay thing for the first few days until my apartment is ready, but I should be able to be in the apartment by Wednesday night.

Yesterday I had to drive to Knoxville for my drug screen. Now, normally that wouldn’t be a big deal, but this agency only uses one chain of labs, so I had to go there, and they wanted results before Friday, so I had to go then. All of which was fine, except that when I got there the place was packed. Seems a local company had sent their entire stable of new employees over for the same purpose, and they had all got there and signed in just before I did. I had prepared for the drug screen like a good little girl, which meant that I already needed to pee when I got there. By the time they got to me, I could have given them 4 or 5 samples and still had a good bit left over! But that got another thing on the list checked, and I’m that much more ready to go. I am definitely ready to get started again; a small amount of vacation is nice, but a paycheck is even nicer!

Staffing over most of the hospital sucks. There is no phlebotomy, so nurses have to do their own lab draws (actually, the patient care techs can do them, but they can’t draw from IV lines, so it falls on the nurses much of the time anyway). On nights there is no clerical staff, so all of that has to be done by the nurses too, unless the techs happen to have clerical training and the time to use it. On my unit, it’s quite a bit the opposite. Most nights there are three nurses, but rarely do we have more than 6 patients, not that I’m complaining about THAT; I just wonder how long it will be allowed to go on. Now some of the nurses who have been out sick or having surgery are returning, and on many nights there will be even more of us. To me this suggests one thing.floating. Now, I don’t mind floating *on occasion*, so long as I’m being floated to some area in which I’m reasonably competent, but the word I am getting is that travelers float first, and I’ll be damned if I’m coming in every shift to go somewhere else. If I wanted to be in float pool I’d have signed on for it!

And.last week the manager who hired me was fired. I still don’t understand the mechanics of that, but it scares the hell out of me. When I first got here I heard rumors of some kind of screaming match between one of the nurses and the secretary who had been doing the schedule, resulting in a communique that all schedule requests and changes were to go through the manager or her superior, a person of whose existence I had been previously unaware. A week or so later, I heard that the manager had resigned. The word was that she was going to cath lab at another hospital in the system. Thursday she stopped by the unit to let the day shift know she’d been fired.from cath lab, from the whole hospital, and apparently from the whole system. Nobody really knows what happened, but apparently there’s going to be some serious uproar in HR.

This morning our secretary was talking about some changes being made. She mentioned that probably most of the travelers would not be extended, but that didn’t particularly bother me, as I have NO intention of extending my contract. Neither do two of the other three who started when I did, and the other traveler, who’s been there for almost a year, had spoken of moving on. My concern is more in terms of my contract being canceled before it’s over. I can deal with that, I guess, if it happens after Christmas, but I need the money up until then.

I’m starting to think about looking for a permanent job.