Salt Lake Behavioral Health Reviews

-Staffing can be challenging at times. -High acuity patients. -Corporate pressure to work fast.

Administration refuses to staff at an adequate, or even safe, level, and continuously "justifies" it by making false claims about patient acuity. It's not unusual to have 1 nurse and 1 MHT for 13-15 patients on "lower" acuity units. Nor it is unusual to just have 1 nurse and 1 MHT on an extremely acute crisis stabilization unit with 8+ patients. Lack of available staff is not the issue, management just doesn't want to pay for that many people to be there. Burn out is guaranteed with such low staffing levels because you end up doing the work of two or three people and will be written up if you can't. Management is generally disconnected from nursing staff and dismisses complaints. Direct supervisors have no real power and cannot generally overrule administration decisions, even when those decisions are blatantly unsafe. Pay for MHTs is on the lower side, and don't count on raises. Old perks like free meals and double pay for picked up shifts have been removed recently to save the company more money. Absolutely no room to grow at the company either unless you were hired into management. Doctors on staff are of varying quality - some have problematic histories at other facilities, at least one has a disturbing criminal background - management doesn't care no matter how problematic they are. There's at least one psychiatrist who refuses to see patients entirely when assigned to certain units, leaving other staff stuck with outdated orders, but is still somehow employed. Most stuff is done on paper - paper charting, paper rounding, etc, which takes a lot of time and leads to frequent errors (which go unreported when caught, as there is no reporting mechanism). There is an eHR/eMAR but that's about it. Basic equipment like vitals machines, thermometers, pulse oximeters, etc are very outdated and poorly maintained. It's not uncommon to have to struggle with or swap out equipment just to get anything done, and many things are held together by tape. A significant portion of equipment is well past its calibration date as well. Transgender patients are often treated with disrespect by staff, with their gender identity either dismissed entirely or not taken seriously by staff as soon as the patient is out of earshot, especially if the patient doesn't conform to staff's expectations. Patients often have to educate staff on their minority experiences in order to be taken seriously, which should never happen. Patients are allowed to smoke on an enclosed patio, so second-hand exposure to smoke is a job requirement. Due to staffing ratios there is frequently only one MHT on the unit to take people out to smoke so you can't avoid it.