We hear a lot about the staffing shortage at hospitals but not a lot about why that is. I (55f) worked in a hospital OR at a smaller regional hospital that was part of a large hospital system. I have a college degree, a required certification, and experience in my field. Working in the OR, it’s normal to be On Call, which means that if an emergency comes into the hospital, I get called and I have to be there within 30 minutes to do the case. I get paid $3 an hour to be on call. With only a 30 minute response time, it means that I can’t do anything that would cause me to be unable to make it in to the hospital within that time. So, if I’m on call, no concerts, baseball games, baking bread, hiking or biking in the park . . . you get the idea. Also, no drinking. The upside of it was that we got paid time and a half to come in and do a call case, with a minimum of two hours. So, it’s really not time off, but it’s part of the deal with working in the OR.
We got a new manager who had never been a manager before, and I suspect that she didn’t even have OR experience, as she seemed really unfamiliar with it. She started by sending us home “on call” during our regularly scheduled hours (with the result being that my hours were cut severely) , and then she would call us in if there was a case to do, but only pay us straight time, not the time an a half that was usual for a call case. This caused a revolt in the entire department, as it was against the written policy, and we complained up the chain of command, as a group, but they higher ups sided with the manager. So, people started quitting en masse. There are plenty of jobs in that field, and people had no problem finding better jobs elsewhere.
As a result of this mass exodus, I was assigned to be on call a whopping 17 days a month. To explain, if I were on call on a Tuesday, I’d be on call from the time I left work Tuesday until the time I started again Wednesday morning. If I got called in for a case overnight, I’d be expected to still go to work the next morning. If I am on call on a Saturday, I was obligated from 7am Saturday until 7am Sunday. So, no fun weekend stuff or weekend getaways. This made my life a living Hell in multiple ways.
As a last resort, I went to my manager and told her that that amount of call was unsustainable for me and that I couldn’t do it. Hard stop. She told me that I had to because there was nobody else to do it. (I wonder why?) I went home that night and started applying for jobs and had an offer for a better job, with better hours, within weeks.
It was nearly impossible to get time off at the old job, even a couple hours here and there. I requested partial days off for the multiple interviews that I was going on but was always denied. So, I called off. Several times. For interviews and all the screening that I had to go through for a new job. I had accepted an offer when I was called into the old manager's office to be written up for excessive call offs, but I handed her my two week’s notice before she had the chance, so that was a very different meeting from the one she had planned and tremendously satisfying.
After I left, staffing issues continued and worsened. Within six months of my leaving, the department of surgery at that hospital shut down completely. One year later, the entire regional hospital is now closing.