On paid administrative leave. What is your experience?

[NurseKN]

This is the first time I've been place on administrative leave and now I'm worried I'm out of the job. What are your guy's experience?

Updates

+1 y

I chose to send them my letter of resignation on the last day of my administrative leave. I didn't want to hear whether or not I will be let go. So I picked up a full-time position at my old job. I am also a nurse

[Craftsman]

My experience with being on Adminstrative Leave as a nurse is that yes, the job is at least somewhat in jeopardy. That's not good.
What works in your favor is that there is a shortage of nurses right now. When it happened to me, I started looking on-line and in the want-ads section of the newspaper (Yes, it was that long ago) and had my resume updated and started following up on some ads and opportunities I found out about. If nothing else, updating the resume and going on some job interviews will productively occupy the time.
Best of success whatever the outcome!

[Bricealan]

My brother was let go from a nursing position a few years ago, and I did not know that people in nursing were in such a vulnerable position?

[NurseKN]

I was working in a community setting. Funding is rather scarce in these sort of positions.

[Bricealan]

Well, the last time I killed somebody, I was put on administrative leave. No big deal, it was ruled justifiable homicide. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[whirled_up_girl]

I've not been on administrative leave but as a nurse myself I would worry about it not to ending well. In my opinion resigning is probably the best way to go then to be let go from a nursing position. Good luck with you new/old job!

[Bricealan]

"Whirled_up": Why would someone get put on ADMIN Leave - on a nursing position? Never heard of that in medicine.

[whirled_up_girl]

@Bricealan It can be a number of things but a lot of times it's done by the facility to do an investigation of the nurse in case if there is suspected mistake or saftely violation and before the nurse could make the mistake or saftey violation could possible happen again. What can seem like a simple miss in healthcare can have drastic consequences and all of us in healthcare know this but sometimes lack of time and certain circumstances make those misses possible. One example I can think of would involve miscommunication of staff compounded by a busy untenable enviroment. Say a nurse delegates vitals to nurse aid, and the nurse aid forgets to get the vitals. Many places will say the nurse is the person with the license and therefore if the nurse aid forgets then the nurse should get the vitals or make sure that the nurse aid has gotten them. When days are busy, this could get overlooked and vitals at the scheduled time could get missed. Now if it happens once or so without incident great, but if there happens to be a negative outcome and/or someone notices a pattern of behavior a nurse could be put on administrative leave while the a manager or someone higher up audits the nurses charts to see if vitals are missed often etc. It's not always meant to be punitive, it's mostly to improve the situation but there are so many variables and sitautions outside of ones control in many enviroments that it's scary to know how easy it could be to miss something critical.

[Wise4myage]

I have no experience with that, but Id say it means you are on your way out. But have you asked for an explanation?

[Bricealan]

Why do they put Nursing personnel on ADMIN LEAVE? If they violated some nursing practice rule, why would they not just out-right fire them?

[whirled_up_girl]

@Bricealan It's not always that easy though to know who's fault it is. Lets say a doctor tells a nurse he's going to order a certain medication for a patient to help with a certain illness or symptoms of some sort. Now lets say that order doesn't show up in the chart and by the time the nurse might notice this, page the doctor get a response, and then get the medication from pharmacy a negative outcome could occur depending of what the medication was for. Now most people would say "but the doctor forgot" yes but the nurse is responsible to make sure the patient's needs are met, so some would say the nurse should have made sure the doctor clarified to the doctor that he or she would put in the order soon and wasn't misunderstanding thinking the nurse would take a verbal order (somethng that used to happen more often as is now frowned upon because of order entry mistakes etc). It's one of the reasons so many nurses unions go on strike over unsafe staffing, not enough staff means doing things in a time frame that's not realisitic to safe care of patients.

[whirled_up_girl]

*doctor clarified to the nurse*

[Bricealan]

@whirled_up_girl My brother lost his job over some instance like you describe

[whirled_up_girl]

@Bricealan That’s too bad, it can happen easily unfortunately. It’s part of what makes the job stressful. Most nurses I know do their best to avoid these situations but there seems to too many variables and gray areas to avoid them completely all the time. I hope your bother was able to find another job.