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hate my new job HCA

I'm working as a HCA in a gp and hate it. I'm working 8:30 to 6 with half an hour lunch break, i am running clinics and the dr's have given me work to do at lunch as well, they say they are too busy to do it. So I have to work whilst eating.

As I've done the PA course previously, so I'm expected to do things like wound care which I have not really done before and feel very out o my depth and only have 6 weeks of clinics supervsied by nurses before I do my own clinics and also have to make sure all the dr's rooms are stocked and cleaned

I told the nurse supervising me that the dr's given me work to do so will be coming slightly later to her clinic that i was shadowing and what does the ***** do? give me bp home readings for her patient to calculate the average and when i did it and give her back the sheet he asked me why i've not put it on the online system. Like **** off.

Then when she was supervising me today the vacutainer came off the bottom of the butterfly needle, like just flew of, and I was about to take the tourniquet off and she goes no, no and she went to get another vacutainer an i put my thumb at the bottom to stop the bleeding and obviously when i took my thumb off for her to put the new vacutainer , blood went everywhere. I would have just taken the torniquet off straight away and but a plaster there Luckily the patient was fine.

Then the nurse and pt both let me try again and i said in I'll try the other arm and the ******* nurse kept was really passive aggressive trying to make me go in the same arm even though i was not comfortable with that. Even the patient seemed a bit weary about going in the same arm.

I hate it
Any advice?

Reply 1

Llamas_and_Cake

No advice that’s specific to healthcare, but basically, get a better job.

I mean, you can people-skill your way to a mildly better experience, and you can put in a complaint if you have a single problem in an otherwise decent organisation. But you can’t reform a place from the ground upwards when there’s a really large amount wrong with it.

The red flags I’m seeing are:

•

They don’t respect basic employment law (no breaks).

•

Senior, highly paid, staff refuse to take responsibility for their own workloads but somehow expect you take responsibility for your own and theirs.

•

They have hired you as a HCA but expect you to work partly as a PA without providing the upgraded respect, supervision, ongoing training or (I bet) pay.

•

Senior staff use their positions of relative power to push you around.

•

Several people are ‘in charge’ of you to the extent that they can pile work on you, but no single person actually holds responsibility for giving you work, meaning nobody is responsible for making sure you’re not overloaded. Predictably, you’re always overloaded.

That’s a really large amount of very serious stuff. It’s (sadly) common enough that it’s a recognisable pattern.

None of this means you should punch your boss, set the place on fire or defecate on anybody’s desk. You can’t fix it and you have a choice to either accept all of the issues and stay (with maybe a couple of improvements if you work hard to charm people) or to leave and go somewhere else.

On the plus side (sort of), HCAs aren’t paid enough and you won’t end up with a significant paycut when you leave, although you may not find a guaranteed 45 hours elsewhere very easily.

I’m sorry about what you’re dealing with. What happened to PAs wasn’t fair, and neither is this. You’ve had a run of extreme bad luck, and it won’t always be like this.

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