Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A “real” nursing job!

I've had jobs before, but this is different. This is the first time I'm actually being paid to act upon my nursing skills that after three full years of nursing school are definitely starting to accumulate. I figured now's a good time.... I start my 4th year in August (out of 5 total... yes I'm one of those who will be in nursing school forevvverrr!!) so I figured summer would be a good time to get a job underway. I'll try to sum it up.... :)

Last week: orientation week. So for three days only, I made a relatively large amount of money to sit on my butt from 7:45-4:30 daily to hear ramblings on OSCA, HIPAA, JCHAO, patient satisfaction, oh and yes - my favorite of the week - electrical safety! ;-) And Wednesday was nursing skills review. Fun. Nothing we didn't learn already in school, but hey, we did get free donuts too, so shall I complain? I think not. ;-)

So, I've kind of been lacking in the blog department lately, especially about all this fun job stuff, so let's back up to about a year ago...

The job recruiter at one of the local hospitals came to my school and I begged her for a job as a student nurse tech. (Not because I needed the money, simply because I'm way overly ambitious and love nursing! You knew that, silly!) She said as soon as my first clinicals were done, call her and she'd hire me. So I did. A few months ago.

Meanwhile, I was interviewing and shadowing at the local children's-only hospital. (Remember my post Angels Fighters + Miracles ? It's all in there) Long story short, I was going to work in the PICU (pediatric intensive care unit) there, and on the day I shadowed, we had a rough day with three deaths including one little boy who started out at school, collapsed on the playground, made for a huge trauma scene in the PICU, and eventually, his little heart just couldn't go any longer. I thought I would be okay, but as the days went by, I realized that working on that kind of floor would just bring back too many memories of my childhood in that very same hospital. Either my scars aren't done healing, or they'll never be done healing - that's not the point. But for now, I have to be completely honest with myself and I know that accepting a position on that kind of floor would be extremely unwise on my part, just asking for cruel, emotional torment. So, thankfully, my interview at the original hospital with the recruiter I met at school went extremely well, I ended up interviewing for a couple floors, and to make a long story short, I'm now employed.

So what is a student nurse tech, you ask? Well, we are in the main "Nursing Department" and basically we can do most of what the RNs do except for meds, etc. - things that require the RN state licensure. There's definite rules on what we can/can't do, but once the nurses on the floor get to know us, they'll let us do just about anything. (One of my friends practices IV insertions on the RNs every night if the patients are sleeping and everything's under control, ha!) We get paid way more than the majority of other college students, I can assure you that, and we are actually getting experience that is directly related to our future careers. And guess what else? WE choose our own hours so it's conducive to our schooling, AND they pay us shift differential for anything after 2:30pm (until like 6 or 7am or something). But that's when we have class/clinical (usually) anyways, so they pay us extra to work when they know we'll most likely work anyways? Umm.... So why does it seem so great? Well, because of the nursing shortage, the hospital likes to sugar it up so when we graduate, they can say, "Remember all those free pens and water bottles we gave you? Oh yeah, and we paid you real nice? We let you pick all your own hours? Remember us? We like you. We gave you free parking. Come work here." All the hospitals do it now... how not-obvious of them.

But hey, I get an excuse to get cute, comfy scrubs - that aren't my school's white, starchy, embroidered uniform scrubs! - so do I care?? Nope. And I'm seriously making statements in my scrubs. No scary patterns here. I have the boot cut pants and the cute little tops in all my fave colors and prints that might even pass as "real clothes"... cute necklines, cute ties, some have eyelets and gathers and all kinds of stuff. Nope, nothing scary and cartoony here! If you ever end up at my hospital (and wouldn't you like to know - I'm not telling! HIPAA might come get me!) you def' can't miss me. I'm the most styling one around. Seriously.

So I spent the entire previous week filling out paperwork, doing random stuff and getting drug-screened and a physical at Employee Health, getting security checked and ID-badged at security, getting my free (yay!) parking pass..... And last week was two orientation lecture days plus a nursing orientation day.

I'm really excited to start working on the floor. It's a brand new neuro floor - just remodeled and we have all new staff, new director, new everything. And the nurse manager (the director) and I hit it off. When I came to meet with her over a month ago (the floor wasn't even open yet), she knew my name and told me how excited she was to finally meet me. She said she had looked through my portfolio and already knew she wanted to hire me. In fact, she went so far as to actually tell me she wanted to clone me. (Weird?) We didn't really talk about anything interview-ish, we immediately went into our hopes and dreams for the floor and the field and where both of us have been and would like to be. Our passions are very similar, and I know she was really impressed when I started sharing what I read in a journal article with her and she pulled that same article off of a pile on her desk. She pretty much told me it's her floor and she is making sure I am on it, and I love her energy and determination. I can tell she's one of those people who gets things done, and I am sure she's not afraid of trying new things, so I'm really excited to work with her. Before I left, she politely asked if she could ask me one little favor. Of course I didn't mind, so I told her of course, and she proceeded to ask if she could make a copy of a page from my nursing portfolio to hand out to every person she hires for the new floor. I had no idea why she'd want to do that, but then she showed me the page, and in my heart, I think I new why.

Basically, last semester we had to write Clinical Journal Entries for school, and my first entry of the semester inspired me to take out all the annoying school parts like "three specific semester goals" and other distracting parts for the assignment, just prune it down to an honest, open Why-I'm-In-Nursing piece. Click to see my post that includes last semester's Clinical Journal Entry #1 and the portfolio version is pretty much that, minus the first paragraph as well as the last 2-3 paragraphs. But back to this... sure enough, almo st two months later, Director was so excited to give every single employee on her floor a copy of that. What an honor. I hope it encourages someone to be a better nurse.

So with that, I begin my real floor nursing today - I have to shadow for 2 8hr shifts and then I'm on my own on my own floor. Normally I'd just be on my floor from the start, but since it's new, they're still acclimating the unit to patient use. So much going on that I'm way excited to share, but getting this post up in itself is an accomplishment (snaps for me!) so with that, I hope everyone is off to a great week! :)