Let me guess, you provide patient care in a facility that runs 24/7, all day, every day, even major holidays?  Hospitals, nursing facilities, EMS providers, police, and fire, all essential services that can't shut down for a holiday or chaos will ensue.   This means you have to work holidays.  It's a given when we signed up for this career.  Too bad we can't shut the doors like some in the service industry do on the major holidays. Perhaps we can alternate with a partner facilities, kinda like coffee shops do?  This location closed for Thanksgiving, please use this alternate location for care.  Nope, this would never work, never ever never.  It would be nice, lets get that right.  We would be able to spend the holidays with our families and loved ones, which is the point of the holidays.  Family! Now that we’ve succumbed to the notion that we are stuck being away from our families on these holidays, we have to put on our big boy (or...

I’d like to welcome you to my first blog post on Teach Us Things .  This blog was the love child that came of a new job opportunity.  I recently embarked on a new journey after 11 years in my most recent facility with several other new colleagues/acquaintances.  There are 8 of us in total that started and are bound for the emergency department in a 500 bed hospital.  We went through general corporate and nursing orientation together and got to know one another a little bit better.  Realizing that my years of experience was greater than everyone’s total made me the “old one”.  As we progressed through the process together there was an identified knowledge deficit for the new nurses as well as me.  This isn’t a bad thing though, it’s just an opportunity to learn, share knowledge, and make our profession better. Starting a new job is never easy, new people, new routines, new policies and procedures, and new equipment.  All of these are anxiet...