- Demanding work: 12 hour shifts, irregular schedules, night shifts, physically exhausting, limited breaks (including bathroom/water!)
- High responsibility with unsafe conditions. You're literally responsible for people's lives. Poor staffing ratios stretch you thin and make you more likely to make mistakes. And if you make a mistake, you're at huge risk for litigation... and now criminal consequences too. Responsibilities, resources, and staffing stretched even thinner due to the pandemic.
- Administration that treats you as something to be optimized and does the absolute bare minimum to support you. Instead they tack on additional tasks, expectations, and requirements ("no water at a nurse's station!"). They encourage a culture where nurses provide a concierge service to 'guests' instead of critical care to patients.
- Hostile/entitled patients. I'd guess many/most patients are not an issue, but it only takes a couple of difficult/combative patients to really ruin your conditions.
- Low pay given the responsibility and working conditions for non-travel nurses. https://nurseslabs.com/nurse-salary/#nurse_salaries_by_state Like many others pointed out here, in tech I make way more than a nurse for a job that's less demanding, has far lower stakes, and is of far less value to society.
To me the blame lies mainly in middle/upper management, whose role is to build and empower an effective workforce. If 90% of your workers are considering leaving, you blew it.
Great post, I copied it here to make it more noticeable in case someone wants to apply for a job here. Everything is well summarized, but I believe that this list could be even longer?