Work here if you want to feel dispensable, pushed to the edge, and can tolerate working in a toxic environment - Registered Nurse Alta Bates Summit Medical Center Employee Review

-Overworked and understaffed regularly without breaks often -Lower pay than other bay area hospitals, like Kaiser -Floating: L+D nurses float to antepartum often (they save the worst assignment for you), and because antepartum can't correctly do staffing they often demand to steal a nurse or two at the start of our shift (bye break nurse!) -Skills Mix: Shortage of experienced nurses + nurses burnt out from constantly training new nurses only to lose them in a year to any other facility (suffered a loss of over 35 nurses from 2020-2022). Also cannot safely train them when preceptors are pushed to work quicker with more patient load, inevitably having to do the job of the newbie in one room while the newbie takes care of the patient in the other room (splitting the work isn't training them properly). Experienced roles are often not able to be filled because newbie's aren't ready for triage, resource or charge roles for a few years. -Leadership/Management style: No positive reinforcement.  LIterally leave the unit when things get bad which is always, they think calling to check in helps. Manager's door is ALWAYS shut and if you want to talk you need to make an appointment, they never come to huddle and when they do it is to reprimand us (how many breaks we're missing, to intimidate us with scare tactics regarding what we are doing wrong, or to accept new work added to our flow without complain, usually trying to put more tasks on the RN that other people like the clerk or the techs could also do). -High Risk Unit: Complete lack of support or any acknowledgement that we are taking care of a very high-risk population and every patient here needs twice the care and attention versus a healthy patient (often patients have multiple drips going, the RN may have two of these patients). Management acts like all of our patients are low-risk, often belittling or questioning why things didn't happen faster, or why you didn't get a break. -Scheduling: No work/life balance. Basically whatever you request off you'll be scheduled to work, and if you want to work a day you'll have that one off. With scheduling it is like walking on eggshells and you feel very owned and tied to whatever schedule you didn't want. No remedy with conflicts. -Chronic Fatigue/Pressured Overtime: Unit relies on each shift to have a handful of nurses that will take mercy on the drowning unit and take the overtime, which leads to tired, burnt out nurses. They don't think you need to sleep. -Poor management/leadership: Inability to be positive, present or supportive, ever. Yell during meetings and like to blame their short staffing on a "national nursing shortage" when really, it's the poor management/leadership style leading to nurses retiring early, jumping to a less stressful L+D facility, or being fired because they didn't want to accept the vaccine that was mandated by the hospital to keep your job. I've never felt more like a child at work than I did during this job. -Intentional Short Staffing: You will witness them allow overtime to staff nurses to cover the board often.  But then they will intentionally cancel extremely important roles on the unit to avoid giving OT to these nurses, "you can do it with one" they say.  So this leaves one body for an important role, like coding an infant, that two normally would share, and with many preterm gestational infants on the unit, this is unacceptable just to avoid overtime. I expressed concerns over cutting these roles in order to save money to management and received complete lack of acknowledgement.  No accountability for their decision making around this and no updates over concerns...sentinel events are swept under the rug and the attitude is "forget it and move on"...there is a budget for everything. You may be put in a situation where you are covering someone else's role, who was cancelled, and you are putting your own license on the line, so if you're OK with that, work here. -Lack of quality in-services: Because it's a high-risk unit there are constant changes in equipment + updates, it's hard to stay up on them when they rush you through in-services just to check you off. -Other housekeeping items like checking your email or working on e-learning (health streams) are things nurses can rarely get to, but are harassed and asked why they didn't get done with a full load and no break. -The Union has a pact with the hospital, non-responsive and not helpful with any issue, grievances take months to resolve.  The hospital is getting away without paying nurses the federally mandated donning/doffing time, stealing 15miniutes/shift and threatening them when they bring it up, saying they are going off "past practice" and "clock out 15 minutes later then, but please don't clock in 15 min before your shift" they say.   We tried to coordinate several meetings with this, what happened is that each meeting the hospital representatives either didn't show up, or asked to reschedule. This kept happening until the nurses finally gave up. So if you have any issue, the hospital will just ignore you and keep rescheduling until you GIVE UP, they own you and you'll do what they say, regardless of the law. Needless to say, I would have loved to retire out here and I liked the challenging/rewarding work and the patient population, but after the above, I saw the writing on the wall and chose to get out, I've never been happier.