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Travel Nursing Hospital
Ranking Results Each
ranking will be averaged and updated on a continual basis. The highest score for
a hospital is 100.
Feel free to rank any
hospital. You are not limited to the ones below.
Travel Nursing Hospital Review of: Kaiser Permanente Panorama City
| | Score
(all time) | Score
(within 1 year) | | 1. Friendliness and acceptance of travelers by staff | 2.5 | |
| 2. How open are they to allowing you to expand your skills while traveling? | 2.5 | |
| 3. Hospital Technology | 2.5 | |
| 4. Location (A nice area to live) | 2.5 | |
| 5. Cafeteria food | 2 | |
| 6. Parking | 3.5 | |
| 7. Physical layout of hospital effecient | 3 | |
| 8. Hospital appeal (looks) | 3.5 | |
| 9. Hospital orientation geared toward travelers? | 2 | |
| 10. Simplicity being initiated into the system (Do you have to do lots of unneccessary paperwork, drug testing, criminal background checks, etc. in addition to what the agency requires before you can start working?) | 1.5 | |
| 11. Reputation of the hospital | 2 | |
| 12. How nice are the doctors to staff | 2.5 | |
| 13. Friendliness of staffing office | 2.5 | |
| 14. Happy with the work scheduling procedure? | 1.5 | |
| 15. How efficient is their system so you can get your job done? | 1.5 | |
| 16. Adequacy of their nurse to patient ratio | 2 | |
| 17. How well staffed are they | 2.5 | |
| 18. How happy were you with your workload? | 1.5 | |
| 19. Staff morale (overall) | 2.5 | |
| 20. To what extent would you recommend this hospital to other travelers? | 1.5 | |
| Total Score (number or rankings) | 45.5(2) | (0) |
- I worked in the Telemetry department(s) in the hospital. This was my first travel contract, and the hospital staffed me in telemetry despite being contracted to the PCU. I could have threatened to walk away from my contract, but I decided to stick it out because I was a travel rookie. Their were a couple great and helpful nurses that I worked with, but for the most part the only help I got was from fellow travelers. I still have nightmares about this place and having no one watching patients while I was stuck transporting high acuity patients ON MY OWN to and from MRI/CT/XRAY,/you name it. Note to all: do not work here unless you feel entirely self sufficient. Good luck. 03/20/2017
Housing was approximately 15 mile(s) from the hospital. The name of the housing complex was Vantage. Housing was located in city of Hollywood. On a scale from 1 to 5, I would rate it a 3. On the edge of the hollywood strip, high traffic area and very loud at times. Overall okay though. - I worked in the Med/Surg Telemetry department(s) in the hospital. I did not have the best travel experience at Kaiser's Panorama City hospital. Several issues arose during my time there that really made life more difficult than it had to be. To start, the hospital really doesn't spend more than two days training you before it expects you to be on your own. Formal classroom training was only half of one day. The other half of the day was shadowing a nurse. The second day was shadowing a nurse, again; but you were encouraged to take a patient or two to practice charting. And then that was it.
As a traveler at the hospital, you will have very limited access to many things. If you're floating to another department (which happens a lot), your ID badge won't get you into the department (if it's locked) and it won't get you into a med room other than the one(s) in your home unit. You won't have access to tap-and-go charting, your glucometer login won't work and you'll have to ask your co-worker to log in for you, you can't complete your patient acuity or GetWell Network (TV based whiteboard and education) because you aren't given access to the systems. It took me a month to get a Pyxis login; and that was just because my manager hadn't sent in my paperwork. You will probably get this uncomfortable feeling that travelers aren't really trusted, even though the hospital has tons of them. Apparently there was some issue with one or more travelers diverting controlled substances or something of that sort and the hospital has never been all that friendly toward its travelers since.
This hospital has a lot of people who were grandfathered into working five 8-hour shifts per week. As a result, you will find yourself floating shortly into your 12-hour shift to cover for nurses who are leaving after their 8-hour shift. So you can be taking care of twice as many patients per day as you're used to if you have only worked at facilities where everyone is 12-hour.
Patient assignments can be very unbalanced as they don't take incoming patient acuity into account when assigning patients. Instead, they just use a round-robin approach to admissions and transfers; so you can end up with a very heavy and unbalance patient load if luck is not on your side. The hospital has a contract with the union where they promise better ratios than the state of California's safe staffing ratio will allow. However, that goes up in smoke if there aren't enough nurses. You'll never get more patients than the state mandates; however, remember that acuity isn't always accurately factored in.
The hospital asks for an awful lot of charting per patient. You will truly feel that you are treating the electronic medical record more than you are treating the patient at times. They use Epic, and it's a very complete electronic medical record solution; but you will likely struggle to feel comfortable with it because there's just so many places where things can be and so many different ways to view everything. You may find yourself asking for help like a new grad until the very end of your assignment because the system is just that complex.
The cafeteria is awful. I mean, seriously bad and overpriced for the low quality. There aren't too many good food choices nearby, either. The choices are even worse if you're working nights. Best advice is to bring your own food.
One thing you will start to notice is that many of the supervisors and employees are hyper-focused on minor, insignificant things instead of the big picture. Many of the nurses I ran into (who worked for the hospital - they were not travelers) don't exercise clinical judgment and only follow the letter of their orders and policies. There's an overwhelming sense of paranoia among the hospital staff about ever stepping outside the lines or questioning orders or even asking for advice.
Another thing I noticed that disturbed me was that people would prefer to just work around a problem instead of intervening and having it fixed. This place has engineering staff on hand 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. All you need to do is enter a ticket if something is not working. You'll encounter a lot of things that aren't working. Why aren't they working? Because someone didn't enter a ticket. If you're willing to be the "ticket-master", you will feel a sense of accomplishment as things get fixed; yet you will feel a sense of disappointment as you're the only one who seems to be interested in making sure things get fixed versus just working around the problem.
With regard to your CNAs, they are often times overworked with extremely high ratios. At best, they have 8 patients to care for. But don't be surprised if they routinely have 12 or more patients assigned.
You have very little control of your schedule, as is to be expected for a traveler. Staffing personnel aren't as responsive as they should be when you need something. Some travelers have complained that their home department's staffing person doesn't reply to emails or phone calls. This can be very discouraging. 03/14/2017
Housing was approximately 5 mile(s) from the hospital. The name of the housing complex was self-acquired. Housing was located in city of North Hollywood. On a scale from 1 to 5, I would rate it a 3. Your best bet is to find a nice place in the nicer part of North Hollywood. If you're not paying at least $2,000 per month for a place, you not in a good part of town. There are many independent apartment complexes that are run by individuals. These can give you a better deal; but be warned that you're not at the mercy of a professional management company with resources as much as you are at the mercy of an individual with sometimes limited resources. Short term leases will gouge you. You could find yourself paying almost $3,000 per month for a 4-month lease; whereas a 10 or 12 month lease would run you almost $1,000 less per month.
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