Satisfaction - Registered Nurse, BSN Graham Hospital Employee Review

Great co-workers, teamwork, and benefits.

There is not much of a downside to being a Graham employee, We are all family.

For many in the area, it’s a great option because their facilities are close to home. My clinic had a great family-like atmosphere and we all pitched in to help each other. But this is not guaranteed at all locations. Many are quite the opposite.

There are unfortunately very many cons. The pay and benefits are downright horrific and embarrassing. They pay their most-educated employees such as nurses and x-ray techs upwards of $8-10 less an hour than their direct competitors within a 20-30 mile radius. Yearly cost of living raises are usually in the range of 2% a year, so maybe 30-40 cents an hour if you’re lucky. They also rely on a skeleton staff to operate their busiest urgent care facilities, so you are responsible for a wide variety of duties that are typically (for good reason) split up into several jobs at competing health care clinics. X-ray techs in most of their clinics are responsible for performing x-rays (which amount to 10-15 on a typical day at urgent care with no positioning sponges or related immobilization equipment needed to obtain diagnostic images on difficult patients), lab draws, EKGs, as well as ordering and labeling all lab specimens (a very difficult process due to outdated and complicated software that only you are trained on). The x-rays will basically take up your entire day, and you have to find time between exams to go through the backlog of swabs done when you were busy with your primary role. It’s an absolute mess and specimens are frequently lost or mislabeled due to the lack of a proper lab tech or at least somebody with a dedicated lab role. You often end up responsible for A LOT more than you are told in your interview once you begin working on your own. Supply ordering for the entire clinic often ends up on your plate as well because that same user-unfriendly lab software is also used for the supply ordering, and your coworkers don’t know how to use it and will refuse to help. It’s a consistent issue with no training to fix it. Management is very aware of this but frankly does not care to address it because they assume you will put up with it because the job is close to home. Many long-time staff stick with the company despite similar complaints being made here because they’re established in the area and don’t want to drive a little further to work. The company knows this and relies on it to continually add more responsibilities on your plate and not pay you a cent for it. They’ll eliminate entire positions and put what all that job entailed onto their x-ray techs. It happened twice in the time I worked there. Right before I left, I received an email stating I was also gonna be responsible for placing heart monitors on patients now, as if the already overwhelming amount of duties I was responsible for weren’t enough and already took up my entire day. Management is also frankly extremely messy. It’s a revolving door of them leaving, stepping down, and adding more people to the administration team with overlapping responsibilities. You never know who to contact because they all have ambiguous job titles and take 2-3 days to reply to emails, and that’s even if they respond. They appear to be incredibly overwhelmed as the company continues to open clinics around the area despite routinely having 50+ job openings and clinics running with a barebones staff. There are many days you will be short a nurse or roomer, so those who do come in are doing twice the work. Meanwhile, the CEO is more focused on opening another clinic in a town with a population of a couple thousand with no staff available to run it. Those clinics see (and I am not even exaggerating) 4 or 5 people in an eight hour day, and the staff from the busy clinics are asked to go work at those much slower facilities instead. It’s a complete waste of time and resources, as well as adding unnecessary stress on the staff at the busier clinics as they lose the help they need to facilities that probably operate at a loss. In general, the higher-ups just feel extremely out of touch with the daily operations, especially when it pertains to imaging. Frequent equipment malfunctions and maintenance due to Graham buying shoddy and poorly-constructed equipment often lead to management questioning you and your education rather than understanding that you do your best with the subpar machines you work with. It was a constant battle having days without imaging or EKG’s available due to the equipment consistently malfunctioning and management’s only concern being to blame you rather than look into the issues with the equipment itself. You will see that the nickel and diming all around the company, whether it’s pay, equipment, etc. constantly affects patients in one way or another. Not being able to offer them services being advertised due to terrible equipment would often end up in email chains of big heads at the company all interrogating you!