Employee Unrest

Whenever there are several employees working together, you are going to find unrest. When you factor in the stress of working short-staffed, the precarious health of those we care for and about, and preferential treatment toward some employees, you have a breeding ground for conflict.

In my facility, there has been a drastic re-organization of the staff in the last few years. Our new Director of Nursing was elevated to her new position after having been the Unit Supervisor in our facility. It appears to many of us as though she is concerned only with that unit, making sure it has plenty of staffing, while the other units continually run short-handed. The other units are often ordered to float one of their staff members to the DON's former unit, bringing them up to optimum staffing, while leaving the other units to scramble to complete their daily work.

Another thing that causes unrest at my facility, is employees who appear to be doing less than acceptable work. For instance, we have one employee on my unit who, we believe, must have imformation in her position that allows her to blackmail the administration. (Otherwise, she would not be allowed to keep her job. ) She has been turned in, and disciplined, on many occasions, for verbally abusing the residents, but still remains in her position. And we are concerned that the care she is giving her residents is minimal. In a thirty-minute time span, she will have done the AM care for four or five residents, when any other CNA on the unit will only have two residents up and dressed. (How is that possible if she is doing her job correctly?) We have tried on a number of occasions to get our Unit Supervisor to deal with this situation, but she is unwilling (or unable) to do anything about it.

Another thing that causes unrest in my facility is the Administrative decisions. Recently, we were told that Administration was going to drop the minimum staffing requirements temporarily, so as to avoid having to mandate employees to cover shifts. Our union contract assures us that we will have a minimum of four CNAs on each unit during the day, three per unit on evening shifts, and two per unit on the midnight shift. The announcement was made (conveniently), when there were no union stewards in the facility - two had been scheduled off-duty, three were working on another shift, one had already gone off-duty for the day, and the last was on vacation. This created an uproar among the employees. As one of the stewards, my telephone began ringing just a few minutes after the annoncement was made, as they had been told that the loss of minimum staffing had been approved by the union (Not True!).

These are the things that make work very stressful.