Short Staffing is a Facility Issue

Short staffing is a facility issue that directly impacts your nursing practice. If you are going to work everyday its the same thing call offs, floating, playing musical chairs with patients and residents, you have to ask yourself is this a healthy environment?

I am not saying you should quit on Monday, but you are a professional. Evaluate your options. How can you better manage your nursing practice and your sanity and still make the money you need? Maybe transfer to a less acute and better staffed unit. Maybe go from a .9 to a .5 and work part-time as a agency nurse. Do what you need to do to protect your nursing license, your nursing practice, your income, and your sanity.

There is nothing wrong with standing strong and fighting a good fight, just remember why you are fighting and what you stand to lose and gain when the fight escalates to a war.

Comments

[Joe Flores]

Well said. I counsel many nurses in Texas and I tell them that Texas is not a friendly state to unions or to a nurse's rights in the workplace. Again and again I have seen nurses who stood up to management and were fired, peer reviewed, reported to the board and ostracized in their own health care community. Recently the tragedy of multiple deaths due in part apparently to Heparin overdosage at Spohn Hospital South caused nurses to speak out at the courthouse steps in Corpus Christi. Nurses nationwide should demand patient staffing ratios and until then do not accept unsafe assignments. You can get a job anywhere but you only have one license. Joe Flores, RN,MSN,CCRN,JD