Fucking hell why are we making people in hospitals who are responsible for the health and wellbeing of everyone work 12 hour…
Fucking hell why are we making people in hospitals who are responsible for the health and wellbeing of everyone work 12 hour shifts with no breaks I feel like I’m going insane does no one else see the problem here??
Every time I make a post about exploitation in jobs with poor wages and no breaks half of the comments are full of teachers and hospital workers going “haha same” and like…. WHAT?? HELLO???
so. i used to work 9-1-1. we were on 8s but with the caveat that we could be mandated for doubles (16s) up to 4 of our 5 days per week (also we weren’t on rotating schedules, we had to work a normal 5/2 instead of a modified Pittman - 2/2/3/3). the union got us the rule that you could only be mandated twice in a row, but my trainer said if you work 2nds you’re almost guaranteed to be be working at least two doubles a week, and he’d been mandated the dreaded double-double-regular-double-double before. i was on 3rds, and got mandated for what they called the Dirty Double bc it was 3rds into 1st meaning i worked 10p on one day to 2p the next afternoon.
we got either four 15 minute breaks or two 30s, but we couldn’t leave the premises and nobody ever did two 30s. bc once you’ve been taking 9-1-1 calls for 2+ hours, if you don’t walk outside or get some water or go piss for five seconds you start to get hazy. when i trained on 2nds, i took 100 calls in an 8 hr period, so any excuse to get up and not be working was welcome. i never ate at work bc shoving something down your gullet in 15 min made me feel sick and i used that time to take a piss and stand up.
my first double i legit left with full body muscle twitching and thought my vision was graying out periodically. i hadn’t eaten in over 20 hrs. my shift manager was like “buck up! you got two hours :D” and i almost stood up and left. thank christ i didn’t have any hot calls those last two hours but i was defo fantasizing about dying lmfao. plus my commute was 30+ min each way so i got ~4.5 hrs of sleep before having to come back in.
when i worked for a huge hospital system in the EDs, 12s were the norm, and most nurses were making $25/hr and techs $16. EMTs make $14 and medics $23. even people that weren’t burnt out assholes were completely fried by hr 8. believe it or not, it used to be worse! i don’t remember the girl’s name, but NY passed a law in the 00s because residents/interns were working 24s and it caused a mistake that killed a girl, so they banned 24s which i think every state has adopted some version of now.
i’ve been trying to tell people that schedule reform is almost more necessary than wages because the only reason more people haven’t died is luck or lack of advocacy for victims. like. the fact that it’s at all legal to work 12 hrs is bonkers. let alone 16s and 24s. let alone in the medical and responder fields. (and not that it excuses malicious bullshit obv. but let’s not kid ourselves that all mistakes are malicious. we have the data on what these shifts do to human decision making and response time.)