A Nurse with a Gun

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings Time. I should be getting an extra hour of sleep. I woke up at 2:35AM, unable to return to slumber. Hell, I have to start seeing patients at 7:00AM. May as well get up and get some coffee.
When I worked on the Cardiac Wards as a nurse, during the night of Daylight Savings Time we worked 13 hours but got paid for 12. Ain't that a bitch? If you wanted to get paid for that extra hour, you had to stick around and work Daylight Savings Time in the Spring. It amazes me how hospital administrations can do this kind of thing with impunity, and how for over a century nurses have refused to unionize. Every time DST rolls around, I think of that extra hour the hospital owes me, and I get mad as hell. Like many nurses, I did not remain in the hospital. I got a couple of years of experience, and then hit an extremely lucrative nursing market outside the sweat shop atmosphere of the hospitals. It is no wonder nursing care suffers in the hospital setting. Experience is not valued by the administration, and a nurse leaves for greener pastures as soon as they can. Why?, a lay person might ask..... Well for me, my pay doubled, my work was cut by 25% and I got to work days instead of nights, all with a simple change of employer. My position on the Cardiac Unit remained vacant until the local nursing school spit out new graduates.
And so it goes.............

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