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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: Alta Bates Summit Medical Center-Ashby Campus
| | Score
(all time) | Score
(within 1 year) | | 1. Friendliness and acceptance of travelers by staff | 5 | |
| 2. How open are they to allowing you to expand your skills while traveling? | 3 | |
| 3. Hospital Technology | 4 | |
| 4. Location (A nice area to live) | 4 | |
| 5. Cafeteria food | 4 | |
| 6. Parking | 5 | |
| 7. Physical layout of hospital effecient | 4 | |
| 8. Hospital appeal (looks) | 3 | |
| 9. Hospital orientation geared toward travelers? | 3 | |
| 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?) | 3 | |
| 11. Reputation of the hospital | 3 | |
| 12. How nice are the doctors to staff | 5 | |
| 13. Friendliness of staffing office | 4 | |
| 14. Happy with the work scheduling procedure? | 1 | |
| 15. How efficient is their system so you can get your job done? | 4 | |
| 16. Adequacy of their nurse to patient ratio | 5 | |
| 17. How well staffed are they | 1 | |
| 18. How happy were you with your workload? | 2 | |
| 19. Staff morale (overall) | 2 | |
| 20. To what extent would you recommend this hospital to other travelers? | 1 | |
| Total Score (number or rankings) | 66(1) | (0) |
- I worked in the ICU department(s) in the hospital. I have to separate my experience as an ICU traveler at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center (Ashby Campus) in Berkeley, CA into THREE (3) distinct categories:
1) As a human person basing my experiences on my interactions with my peers and work, I loved it.
2) As a nurse in general I liked it/it was OK, there were some challenges.
3) As an ICU-traveler I felt abused. I would not extend for any amount of money nor recommend this assignment as I experienced it to another person.
I will start by saying that almost every single nurse-nurse, nurse-doctor, and nurse-staff experience I had was very positive. Most of the employees are really grateful for your being there, for the help, are upbeat and just cool people, and I was often asked if I would stay on as a Full-Time employee or extend at the end of my contract. I might have signed on as an employee, but I definitely wouldn't extend for the following reasons.
PROS: I liked the charting system (EPIC). I liked the location of the hospital, the area, the city and surrounding cities. I liked the free parking across the street (on the PM and NOC shift). I liked the people and for the most part felt well supported by my peers, Charge RN, support staff, manager (as I left, he was leaving).
CONS: There are always a few sour apples. It's UNION so the bad apples won't change and just make life dangerous for the patients and difficult for you with them. Very low moral-Everyone is unhappy, leaving, or on their way out. The manager I was hired by was gone by the time I started, and when I left the assistant manager that also hired me was leaving too. Aside from us (nurses/staff) liking each other, staff was very frustrated with the politics of it all (slow moving, tension between nursing and administration). I am not sure there would have been much room for growth as a Full-Time staff-it did not seem like they were training or planning on training any of their nurses up. The schedule was awful (8 hour shifts) and that was one of the biggest complaints by staff (difficult to request days off, get time off/vacation). Patient population in the ICU includes A LOT of withdrawal, overdose, DKA, pancreatitis, renal failure, sepsis, otherwise, seems pretty low acuity.
TRAVELER ISSUES: Sutter uses an intermediary for setting up/managing travel nursing contracts called "Right Sourcing." They are awful. I don't even know where to start or how to get into it, but never again will I accept a contract with a union OR an intermediary company, because it makes life difficult for everyone. No one talks to anyone, there is no room for negotiating, no one person (intermediary or hospital or agency) ever has (all) the answers, and that puts a minimum of three cooks in the kitchen when it comes to financial and administrative issues. Once I was unable to log into the charting system and look at my patients or scan meds for THREE DAYS because no one could figure it out and kept deferring responsibility. Thankfully IT gave me temporary access every night, but that meant 20-30 minutes on the phone with IT at the beginning of my shift, while the previous nurse is impatiently waiting to give me report, or just taking report without online access. Just imagine it. Awful. Because of all these cooks in the kitchen (plus ICU manager, scheduler, administration), after week three, I never again had a correct check. In fact, the process for documenting/approving overtime was changed twice during my assignment, and my OT was often rejected. It didn't matter if I tried to get ahead of these issues, my hours would be edited and no one wanted to deal with concerns in real time. I am still waiting to get paid my hours and OT-it's just not worth it to take an assignment like this where it's a standard for them to do this to you (I had five friends, other ICU travelers going through similiar if not worse experiences at the same time).
Beyond financial issues-you get abused as an ICU traveler. I heard that Kaiser floats a lot, but at Sutter, it seems that they don't hire for any other specialty-they hire ICU travelers and literally treat you like the float pool. There was one week that I worked 5-nights and never once in the ICU. In fact, I was floated to a different floor every day, including the Oakland campus twice. My last shift, I was in 5 different positions in 12 hours (break nurse, ICU assignment, floated as monitor tech to ITC, break nurse for ITC, cover the Charge position, back to break nurse/monitor tech). Mind you, that didn't happen every shift or even every week, but treating someone like that is a bit much, especially because it COULD be everyday that they do that to you. Once is Ok, more than once in one week-too much. 06/18/2019
Housing was approximately n/a mile(s) from the hospital. The name of the housing complex was n/a. Housing was located in city of n/a. On a scale from 1 to 5, I would rate it a 4. I secured my own personal housing. I hear there were many adequate options in Oakland and surrounding areas. It's SF/CA expensive.
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