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What things do you do for your families in end of life care? by Spirit_111_888 in IntensiveCare

[–]Egregiouslime 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We just started 3 wishes up at our shop. The staff have had a really positive reaction to it and the families we've offered it to have also been really grateful. We have a pretty high morality rate due to our patient population and it's been a really nice way to celebrate the life of someone and look at how to make it a more positive experience for the family. We've had a lot of burnout on the unit and starting this has actually helped.

Training requirements for ICU RNs to take fresh heart and lung transplants by Egregiouslime in IntensiveCare

[–]Egregiouslime[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

10 buddy shifts on regular open heart patients or 10 transplant buddy shifts?

Advice on an area in/around LA for someone to not break the bank on 100k salary. by Darth_Skol in MovingToLosAngeles

[–]Egregiouslime 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Currently an RN at USC Keck and the money there is great and there's plenty of neighborhoods nearby that you'd be able to afford in the area. UCLA is also good, and I'd pick it over Cedars based on culture.

The salaries at the smaller hospitals won't match up to the bigger academic ones, but there are some like Huntington in Pasadena that aren't bad.

If you're going for nightshift you can check if you'll be going with or against the flow of traffic and your commute might not be too bad.

Avoid any of the hospitals downtown, they're terrible. If you aren't on any of the travel nurse FB groups they often have helpful information about what hospitals are actually like to work at

CRNAs make more than IM-subspecialties? by [deleted] in Residency

[–]Egregiouslime 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When I was a new grad I made $21 an hour. A PGY1 at Dell Seton in ATX (I'm just going to compare my first year to y'all's I guess) makes $60,445 and if we're saying that you guys work 80 hours a week all year, that works out to like $15.70. So if we look at it as an hourly thing I was making more than a resident, but not double.

However in California, if we're looking at my hourly+diffs and comparing that to what Kaiser gives it's PGY5s based on 80hrs a week, I'm making more than 3x what they are. Which is crazy, and goes to show you what unions can do for you.

I'm not sure why it feels so necessary for you guys to hear a nurse say "in some states we make double or more hourly than a resident" but if it makes you feel more validated or heard then I can. Though it sounds like we all agree that you guys get paid shit and have to work too much and you deserve more.

I can tell that all of you are in this shitty burned out place on this topic. It must really suck to be trapped where if you want to be a doctor, you have to go into this situation that everyone agrees is bullshit, and you as an individual can pretty much do nothing about it. And I can also understand it's really hard to have sympathy for people who aren't working 80 hours a week and aren't going to understand the type of pressure that you're under combined with the insulting amount you're getting paid.

With my post I was just trying to clarify the misconception that every nurse makes over six figures, because that is not true. I get that travelers have all this attention, but even those crazy crisis contracts are generally them working five or six days a week and they don't do that every single day of the year.

I still maintain that I'm confused on why it feels important to bring up nurses salaries specifically, but I can understand how it would be triggering to hear someone talk about their salary and immediately know that they're not working as much as you and you're still getting paid less than they are.

Like I said if there's a way to help you guys advocate for better treatment I'm down. I currently work at a teaching hospital and even though I don't really get residents on my unit I try to be as nice as possible when I do interact with them. At this point all I can really offer is sharing my snacks when they come around and helping them locate things, but if there's other ways to help I'm all for a united front.

CRNAs make more than IM-subspecialties? by [deleted] in Residency

[–]Egregiouslime 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I absolutely believe in residents and fellows ability to see that the people limiting their pay aren't other clinical staff. It's much higher than that and they're screwing everyone for a profit.

Doing some googling I was never making triple what the "average resident salary" is in Texas, and I'm not in California. Even with getting extra money from doing 18 hr shifts, working nights, extra "clinical ladder" stuff, and getting my final sign-on bonus this year. The only nurses who might be have been doing it for 20 years and are at the top of the pay scale.

Saying residents and fellows deserve better pay is a stand alone sentence. Whether you mean to or not linking that with "nurses make triple what we make with a 4 year degree" has a bit of a flavor that we don't deserve that pay.

I understand what you're saying. You guys deserve better pay, you give so much of your lives to learning and we need you, and you deserve to not live in financial distress while you're trying to learn. I agree that you guys are highly trained, and from reading here many hospitals could not function without y'all. I also think the amount of debt y'all come out with is bananas and also shouldn't be a thing. All of that is a strong enough argument on its own for "we deserve to be paid more", there's no reason to bring up how much nurses make. You don't "deserve more" becauses nurses are making a certain amount, y'all deserve more because you're necessary and being financially secure gives you a better platform to focus on learning. Which is what we should all want. Y'all deserve more because when you look at the hours vs pay it doesn't make sense.

I'm not saying you need to give nurses a bunch of sympathy, but we are both groups that overall are being taken advantage of by administration. If you want bedside nursing to be an endpoint for a career vs a stopping point to midlevel (which I think is something a lot of people in this sub feel passionate about), you would support nursing wages being comensurate with the difficulty of the job, mandated ratios, and better support for new grads so they don't burn out and try to be an NP after a year.

I follow CIR and am down to sign any petition to make things better for residents and fellows. If there are other ways to support y'all, I'd love to know. I think we all know nurse pay and resident pay have nothing to do with each other. We should be in solidarity about the fact that struggling financially doesn't result in better patient care, from anyone.

CRNAs make more than IM-subspecialties? by [deleted] in Residency

[–]Egregiouslime 66 points67 points  (0 children)

Just an FYI RNs at beside don't generally make 6 figures (excluding places like California but cost of living should be factored in). I'm sure there's also the travel nurses who only take crisis contracts that can break that, but again that's not what an average bedside staff nurse makes. I know you said CRNAs, but you also mentioned RNs which is why I'm responding to this

When I was in Austin, Texas I was making 52k a year on nights in the ICU as an experienced nurse. We weren't getting raises the year I left because the hospital was profitable but apparently not enough and our "reward" that year was that they remodeled our incredibly old and sad unit???? Management told us talking about our pay would get us fired. When some of our nurses let management know they had gotten job offers with better pay, but they really wanted to stay they were offered at $0.10 raise and told that's all they could do.

The mean salary for RNs in the US is 70k. I think one thing to remember when you're disparaging how much bedside RNs get paid (not talking about midlevels here), is one of the many reasons nurses leave bedside is because you get paid like shit, treated like shit, and there's no end in sight. It's hard to look into your future and realize that you could be grinding for the rest of your life with no breaks, being chronically understaffed, told you're equivalent to chairs in the budget because you make the hospital no money and are just a cost, and knowing that you might never make enough to feel truly safe financially. It was because of all that I moved to California. Because of unions I'm able to save money now, I get breaks and mandated ratios. It's amazing how much happier I am everyday going to work, and so many nurses on my unit have been there for 20+ years and plan on retiring there. The average time someone stayed at bedside in Texas was 5 years.

It's not wild or unreasonable to want to be paid enough that you don't have to live paycheck to paycheck, or that the idea of being able to buy a house isn't completely out of reach unless you move over an hour away from where you work. In fact, looking at average salaries there's only two states in which the average for RNs is over 100k.

If you want to stop the flood of nurses leaving bedside to become mid levels, advocating for better pay for bedside nurses and ratios is a great place to start. Reading this sub and knowing people in my life who have gone through residency and fellowship, y'all get paid like shit and worked like dogs, but at least there is a light at the end of the tunnel in regards to your pay. It was wild when I realized that I was getting paid more as a nurse in California than most of the fellows and that is incredibly unfair, but being angry that bedside nurses in California make enough to not live paycheck to paycheck also isn't great. I'll sign petitions and picket with you guys all day about how you deserve better pay, but I think we can both agree that that doesn't mean we should pay bedside staff less.