Nurse Jobs London

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.