Pros
-You will learn a lot about patient care, and a lot about yourself too. -Always have overtime available -Tuition reimbursement and health care available if you work 3 days a week or more -Some of the RNs, PAs, NPs, and MDs are extremely intelligent, hard working, and kind. Same goes for the majority of the support staff that keep the hospital humming. Smile at someone and they most likely will smile back! -Lots of diligent equipment to make patient transfers safe and easy.
Cons
-Unsafe patient ratios on telemetry floors. -Super high turn over leads to chronic short staffing on all floors. This makes the job very difficult. As a nurse extender my ratios have gone as high as 18:1. Impossible to get the work done, and every shift is short. Patients get frustrated and angry when they feel their needs are not being attended to in a timely fashion; staff gets frustrated and angry when expected to do the work of three people. -Super high turn over leads to constant influx of freshly graduated inexperienced nurses with 7-8 patients each. See above vicious cycle about patients and staff. -Management does not take an active role in correcting the behavior and performance of nursing staff-but always push Press Ganey numbers down our throats. -Antiquated payroll and HR systems do everything on paper, takes forever to get anything done. Almost everyone I've dealt with in payroll, HR, and employee health has acted like I'm inconveniencing them by asking them to do their jobs.