Dax bitches about her hospital job: The masterpost!
You may have seen me in the tags complaining about my old job, how I was left behind or didn’t have all the right info or whatnot. Well here’s where I’m putting it all so that you don’t have to scroll through a bunch of posts to get the whole story!
Bitching under the cut! Keep in mind that I am autistic, have chronic hip and arm pain, and I was working the night shift, and only 19 at the time.
1: Poor communication. This is the BIGGEST issue I experienced.
1a: Nobody told me you had to terminal clean rooms with bleach water, or that there was a specific ratio of water to bleach tablet I had to follow. One person would say I had to clean the behind-the-scenes of the pharmacy, another would tell me that was the afternoon shift’s job.
1b: When the new hire came in, she took over the Emergency Department, and I was switched over to MSTU (long-term patient area). I was not told that I would have my department switched, nor did I receive any proper training on that area. Also, one time the new hire was told that she only needed to vacuum three of the entrance rugs, and that I would do the other three. I wasn’t told about that until one of the older janitors yelled at her about it while we were in the break room.
2: Frequent interruptions. I thrive best on routine, but I had to be the one carrying the pager (little device that would sing a little song and display a number that corresponded with one of the patient areas) and I would have my routine interrupted and have to go clean up some gross stuff.
3: The workload. This one wasn’t an issue until the last week of my job, otherwise I would have quit much sooner. On top of wiping down the waiting room chairs, mopping the waiting room floors, wiping down the reception desks and chairs, mopping the laboratory, maintaining triage, maintaining 4-8 bathrooms, and routinely taking out garbage and dirty linen every hour or so, I also suddenly had to terminal clean all eight “rooms” of ER fast track, which were less rooms and more small sections separated by curtains. I had to take off the (often clean!) sheets, wipe down the padded table they call a mattress, wipe down the underside of the mattress AND the table itself, crouch down to get all the nooks and crannies beneath the table, including the pedals, AND wipe down all the individual cables that connected to the monitors and those things the nurses use to look into your eyes and ears, rinse and repeat 8 times. I could do one or the other in a night, but doing both meant working overtime and one time the morning shift lady had to take it over for me. Also, I wouldn’t have gotten a raise for doing the work of two people, but that actually didn’t occur to me until after I left.
3a: It didn’t make sense to me that we would only term clean these rooms once a day. I figured it would be best if they were cleaned between EVERY patient, and suggested to my boss hiring a third janitor to do that specific part of the job, but he spouted some bullshit about how he would have to sit down all day and see how much time we’re spending actually working vs sitting around which. Did not make sense to me.
4: They kept leaving me in the middle of the night, all alone, no help whatsoever. If I got paged to term clean two rooms, one of them would have to wait. Oftentimes I was the only person available for both units. It was a nightmare.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the routine part of the work! Genuinely, I loved knowing that I was making this place safer for everyone, even if the floor was a slipping hazard half the time
Also this is the only hospital in town so it’s going to be very awkward if I end up in the ER overnight
Edit #1: One of the higherups took our wet floor signs because he tripped over one, saw that there were like 5 (ER waiting rooms have a lot of entrances), and thought there were way too many (even though I tried to use as few as possible). I never knew where they went. Then it tied back into poor communication, being that I was never told that I was supposed to have a couple signs on my cart.
