Good experience but huge safety issues
Pros
Great if you don’t have experience in the medical field and are interested in working in mental health as you will see cases here you probably wouldn’t be exposed to anywhere else. There’s also a hand full of very good techs, nurses, and supervisors who genuinely care about the patients, make the unit feel like a family, and they make this job worth it. Also the majority of the patients are nice and respectful.
Cons
The biggest con of working here is you CANNOT be passive with your coworkers when it comes to patient safety. You are going to have to advocate for patients rights regularly. I truly believe some techs do not care if the patients live or die and actually enjoy engaging in take downs/physical restraints. You cannot trust the majority of your coworkers to be vigilant and actually check on the clients when doing rounds even the day after a very serious incident occurred. If you work here be prepared for coworkers to treat you poorly or gossip about you for doing your job correctly and taking patients safety seriously. You will be put in dangerous situations and situations that are a huge liability to you and whatever license you may have. The full time staff make more than the prn staff which is odd. The environment is very cliquey. Nurses gossiping about staff with the team lead in front of patients. Techs gossiping about patients and coworkers in front of other patients. Nurses talking to the techs in an extremely unprofessional and disrespectful manner. Coworkers disappear from the unit for hours on overnights or are sitting in the break room not on break playing games on their phone or sitting on the patient couches watching tv when the other techs are running around working. If you’re a conventionally attractive female get ready to be made uncomfortable and hit on by your coworkers every single day, most of which are married with children. Yikes.
