Traveler Dumping

[amberdouglas]

mtrobin

as a nurse from Arkansas i find your comments about Arkasnas people being rude to be VERY bigoted. Your supposed to be an educated intelligent person, don't stereotype.

As for Ark Childrens NICU, I don't know anything about how its run from a nursing standpoint, but from the standpoint of a mother whose child was a patient there 5 years ago after being born 8 weeks premature, I loved my son's nurses and thought the facility was wonderful.

[TRVL RN]

Originally Posted by ChrisChirdo

do you guys find that travelers get the worst assignments, worst patients, and are running around while the staff is not doing anything.

YES I AGREE DEFINETLY STAY AWAY FROM TIFTON GA ICU UNIT...ITS A HORRIBLE PLACE THE STAFF IS RUDE AND VERY UNFRIENDLY TOWARDS TRAVELERS. THE STAFF MEMBERS STATE "SINCE THE TRAVELERS MAKE SO MUCH MONEY WE WILL GIVE YOU THE WORST PATIENTS. YOU HAVE TO WORK FOR YOUR MONEY" THEY WILL NOT INCLUDED TRAVELERS OR LOCAL AGENCY WHEN THERE IS A LUNCHEON OR PIZZA WAS ORDERED FOR THE WHOLE UNIT. THEY MAKE SURE THEY TELL THE TRAVELERS AND AGENCY STAFF THAT ITS JUST FOR THE REGULAR STAFF ONLY.

[LnD girl]

I work L&D and have been lucky for the most part.
Most hospitals do adhere to the strict staffing guidelines for L&D units everywhere. One thing that I think does help is that I let people know that I travel b/c I'm not sure where I want to live eventually and want to test the waters before I commit to a particular area of the country. Maybe that is part of the reason I haven't had many problems...maybe they see me as a potential staffmember and don't want to scare me off. Either way, when I go to a new assignment, I pretty much expect to get dumped on and to be an outsider, then if it does happen, I'm not disappointed. So far it has only happened at one assignment and that was on a Post partum floor. They did tend to overload the travelers with the "difficult" pt's (fresh post-ops, mag pt's, multiple admissions) But we travelers worked together AND helped out everyone else (basically ran circles around'em)
Now that doesn't mean that there hasn't been at least one or two nurses at any given assignment that I've gotten the cold shoulder from or maybe an attitude, but I let it roll and go about my business and usually by the end of the assignment, we are fine. Hope this made sense, I'm REALLY tired!

[stellar]

Amberdouglas, let's face it, if nurses treated their fellow nurses with the compassion and sensitivity they treat their patients and families, we truly would be the noble profession.

[amberdouglas]

I don't think it has anything to do specifically with treating other nurses with compassiona and caring, but with showing EVERYONE that respect. And making sterotypical generalizations about someone just becasue of the area they are from is not the way a nurse (who are the pillars of society) should act.

[stellar]

Yes, I agree it is silly to make a negative stereotype of an entire geographical area, but that was not my point. Patients and families see another side of nurses that they do not always consistently portray to their peers. We all know how mean nurses can be to each other. Does "eat their young" ring a bell? My point is that one cannot gauge the internal culture of a unit, that is to say, the working conditions, by the perspective of patients and families.

[amberdouglas]

I agree, the patient perspective is always much differant from the nurse perspective. And I said, I don't know what its like there from a nursing standpoint. It may be really terrible at that hospital for travelers, I know I have been on assignments where the traveler is ALWAYS the first one to get an admission regardless of acuity of patients or number of patients, and the traveler is the one that no one wants to help during their code, but fully expect yout ot help them during theirs, and of course is ALWAYS expected to know every intricate detail of a facilities policies and procedures and know where everything is after just one 12 hour shift of orientation. I fully agree that travelers get treated like DIRT ( i have posted a rant before on that very subject). But I have NEVER said that just becasue I disliked a unit or a facility that everyone from that entire STATE was a scumbag. That was the part of the particular reply to the post that upset me. I may travel for a living, but I always go home because I love my home and I wish peole would reserve judgment for when they have experienced more than a small portion of it.