RN's are leaving the wards in droves. A small number are going into nurse practioner and pen pusher type roles. A larger number of us are perfectly happy to take pay cuts to get the hell out. Lucky for us our husbands and partners tend to not work in health care and are generally the breadwinners.
The following is a message I got from a friend when I poured my heart out to her and it is an example of the types of emails I get all the time at militant medical nurse.
"That's why I got out of nursing. I let my RN license lapse when Becky was little, got a job as a secretary at a car dealership on minimum wage and felt so relieved.
When I worked in maternity on night shifts and if weren't busy they would pull me and send me to be in charge of a medical-surgical floor where I knew no one and nothing about medical-surgical and there were forty patients! And then the doctors were so mean and arrogant! I knew one doctor who said she deliberately wrote orders sloppily so she could read it any way she wanted if she was ever called to court, thereby letting the nurse take the fall. Their abuse of the nurses was horrific, and the patients were worse. I admire you for what you do. I know it's so hard the way things are set up. Aimee is thinking of nursing as a career and I tell her to do something else! I would never go back if I was starving even. Believe me I have had my share of financial troubles. But I won't go back. Take care."
This is from a nurse in North Carolina, where the pay and working conditions are generally much better than what you see in the UK. No wonder UK nurses are leaving...one or two become doctors, a few find jobs in the community, the rest escape healthcare altogether and so on and so on.
No comments:
Post a Comment