Wind of Change

Thank you all so much for all the blog love!  I really considered that I was doing this for myself, but if reconnecting with and growing closer to people happens as a result, that is all the better, right?

This week has been a rough one.  I do pretty well with working night shift in general, but every now and then, I have a week of not being able to fall asleep and stay asleep during the day.  This was one of those weeks.  I slept all day on Monday and got called off, and that threw me off.  And there are some changes going on at work that are causing me stress, and stress causes insomnia.

Change is the only constant in life.  The ability to embrace change instead of fearing it is important, but I’m a bit slow in warming up to some of these. I love what I do, and I have always loved the company I work for.  They have always put patient care first and made their employees feel valued.  Having said that, I am going to unload a ton of negative feelings.  But remember, I love my job.  I really do.  

We recently found out that there will be no employee raises this year.  I have been amazed that during this recession our company has been able to give raises to all employees every single year up to this point.  I have known plenty of people who have been laid off, furloughed, forced to retire early, or taken across the board cuts in pay in recent years.  So the fact that this happened is disappointing, but not at all surprising.  I really blame the economy in general more than the company I work for.

The first issue is that our payroll has been contracted out.  When I first started working there, it was shocking to me to see people rip open their paychecks as soon as they were delivered.  I had not seen people do that since I was a teenager with a summer job.  It seemed so unprofessional to me.  I soon learned why they did it.  With all the different pay designations, bonuses, and shift differentials, it is easy for a mistake to be made.  The good thing was that getting it fixed was as easy as a phone call to your supervisor.  Now it is difficult to fix.  One side effect of this outsourcing is when overtime pay kicks in.  We have always gotten overtime after working 36 hours.  So if you take an extra shift, it is a full 12 hours at time and a half pay.  Starting July 1^st, we won’t get paid overtime until we work 40 hours because "the new company doesn't do it that way".

Another negative change is that a new “central staffing” department is having to approve our work schedules.  Making my own schedule is an important reason I chose this job.  When I started, I didn’t have to work weekends at all.  I am now required to work one weekend per schedule.  We sign up for 3 nights a week, and if we opt to add a fourth night, we receive on-call pay.  If they call us in, we get overtime rate, plus on-call pay, plus bonus bucks.  It ends up being a significant amount.  If they don’t need us, we still get the on-call pay just for being available.  Now with central staffing, they are changing on-call days to “overtime” days so they can call you off without having to pay on-call pay.  

Another new development is that the resource nurse is calling to reevaluate staffing ratios every 4 hours.  On other units, nurses can have 5-8 patients.  It is easier to anticipate needs halfway through a shift.  In critical care, the optimal ratio is two patients per nurse.  We have to send two critical care nurses to all code blue, rapid response, and code medic calls.  That can leave the unit down by 2 nurses for an extended time.  And there are often “all-hands-on-deck” situations within our own unit.  Having bare bones staffing can be dangerous.  Several nights this week, they sent a nurse home at 11pm to achieve “optimal staffing”, and then we ended up getting several admissions and being tripled up and stressed to the hilt before the shift was over.  It has been awful.

All of these small changes add up to making employees feel devalued.  Morale is at an all-time low, and several of my coworkers are looking for other jobs.  With school starting for me soon, I wasn’t going to be able to work a lot of overtime anyway, but the negativity of all the other changes is weighing on me.  No one is happy, and the negativity is contagious.