I am currently a floor nurse at Sanford and was there when it was Meritcare. I know as far the the nurses who work the floors, most are very unhappy and things are only getting worse, not better on our working conditions. We are taking higher acuity patients and they are cutting back our floor budgets and patient to nurse ratios. Nurse are getting burnt out and many looking for new jobs. We have no say in any changes and none of them make any sense. They are decided by someone who works in an office and has never been on the floor and we are given no input.
Some counselors have been sent out to floors with low morale and high turnover. They have been instructed by the higher ups to tell staff that if your not happy about whats going on then leave, you are replaceable. Our health insurance is absolutely horrible and over priced. I know some floors are not getting granted vacation times because they are so understaffed and their scheduler cannot approve them, but they are told they have to use their vacation before they loose it because they are nearing their max hours. They are understaffed because people are leaving because they get paid better somewhere else and just can't deal with the working conditions.
The amount of turnover has greatly increased since they took over. The nurses who have chosen to stick around are carrying the floors with all the new nurse which are mostly new graduates and have little to no experience. Anyone who is a nurse knows that you do most of your learning on the job, and there is so much you do not know after graduation Our floor does a good job of trying to pair each new nurse with an experienced one, which makes the experienced nurses almost have a double assignment because we are the ones making sure their patients are being taking care of and nothing is getting missed.We are also teaching them the skills they need to be a good nurse. Needless to say because of this, we end of being overworked and stressed and this has made many experienced staff begin to dread coming to work and our leaving.
Instead of doing something to keep the nurses who are here, they choose to try to bring in new experienced nurses with a $15,000 bonus. This pretty much was a slap in a face to us who have stuck around and we lost even more nurses. We were told we got bonuses and raises, that should be enough. I am sorry but a $300 dollar a year bonus and a our 1-3% raises up until last year it was 3-4%, does not make up for the $15,000 bonus they gave to these nurses.
I will say though, I would go to Sanford if I was sick. They are very good at bringing in highly recruited physicians and they do a lot of things that other hospitals aren't capable of because of their recruiting. I know that our floor does a great job of making sure all the patients are taken well care of due to the fact of our pairing of nurses and making our experienced nurses watch the new nurse closely and check on their patients often throughout your shift. I will also say that I don't know how much longer we can keep this up. We are running out of experienced nurses because of burnout and many people are leaving that had worked their for 20+ years.
I hope that things do turn around but time will tell. I am not anticipating that to happen if Sanford doesn't figure out that they need to be treating their nurses well because they will not run if they do not have us. I just had to paint the picture of what I have seen because I don't think a lot of people in the general public know what goes on behind the scenes. This is only my experience. Different areas may have a completely different experience.
