I’m a new grad pediatric nurse only 6 months into my 12 month residency. I’m at my wit’s end. I’ve done pretty well in general, I’ve been overall successful, but I absolutely hate it. Ideally I will stay for the full 12 months but I think I need to start looking at opportunities now so that I have a plan/something to freaking look forward to. Staffing and management is quite possibly as bad as it can be. We’re either being low-censused or dangerously understaffed. My schedule is awful. And I honestly am heartbroken to find that I do not enjoy peds anywhere near as much as I expected. Every single task takes 10x longer, involves 10x more screaming, and parents. IVs are often next to impossible on babies and toddlers and were shamed for reaching out to the vascular team, meaning our approach is to wrap up the kid/baby in a sheet, 3-4 people hold them down, and we stick them an average of 3-5 times until they’re sweaty, bright red, and close to passing out. Then their IV goes bad halfway through the shift because they’re 18 months old and that’s how it goes. Meanwhile my meds are all overdue for other patients, I’m getting an admission who’s going to need a full septic work up, straight cathed, LP, blood cultures (we don’t have phlebotomy for labs either), and I’m getting yelled at by a parent because I woke up their baby right as they finally got them to go to sleep, just so that I could get a set of inaccurate vitals that took 30 minutes to obtain due to kicking a screaming and the doctor couldn’t care less what the vitals are anyways, but vitals are ordered so I have to do it. It’s torture. It feels like I go to work and torture children. I go to work and have parents and/or the doctor and/or someone on earth ticked off at me all the time. It’s impossible to ever have a shift where someone’s not disappointed, even when I do everything right. I worked in adult med surg as a tech and as a nurse Extern for 3 years before I became a nurse. Med surg is extremely difficult but peds is a unique kind of rough. I honestly dream of just working a mundane outpatient job. I think about it 24/7 at this point. I worry about losing my skills and job opportunities, I worry that it will limit my career development and basically back me into a corner. I’m afraid that once I go to outpatient, it will be difficult to ever get back into inpatient or advance my nursing degree. But then I think about my nervous system and I just know for a fact I would be a completely different person if I wasn’t constantly overstimulated, EXHAUSTED, and relentlessly stressing over every little failure every single shift. Sorry this is a lot and probably something someone posts every single day, but I would love any sort of input.   submitted by   /u/Agile-Bag-661 [link]   [comments]