as posted, my job is to push beds in a hospital, but there is a funny clause on my contract:
‘In addition to these duties (pushing beds), other duties may be assigned.’
Meaning they can dump everything they want on me.
During the interview, before starting my job, I asked the manager about this clause and he said, “just helping the nurses to move patients on the bed”. Fine I thought, I can live with that.
The manager lied to me. I’ve been doing much more than that, things nobody told me would be my responsibility, like looking for medicines on other units, looking for patients out of the unit because nobody finds them, and more I don’t want to list.
On a later conversation per email, manager told me he wants someone who offers ‘mutual support’. I told him nobody is supporting me when I have to correct how other nurses placed the electrodes on patients, or how infusions are usually not disconnected after infusion, meaning I’m the one who has to discard them and clean the line before pushing the patient, how patients complain to me they’ve been asking for a nurse for hours because they wanted to go to the toilet, but nobody ever comes, meaning I have to toilet them…, how oxygen bottles are never ready, the long distances I have to cover sometimes (big hospital), that I have to help the radiologist to place the patient on the working surface, because he is either too fat or too senile, patient files nurses don’t find and tell me I have to find them (wtf?)
I don’t mind doing everything related to my job, I don’t mind the long distances I have to cover, I don’t mind explaining anatomy to a scared granny or the results to a man scared of losing a leg, I don’t mind helping the technician or calling him to ask if this is a good moment to bring the patient, but they’re shamelessly using this clause to dump everything they can on me.
I do mind being used like this.
I sent an email to this manager explaining all this, just using better English, asking him if he expects me to work as a nurse when there are no patients to move and becoming the guy who pushes beds when needed to, stating that if so he has unrealistic expectations and I’m still waiting for an answer.
I also wrote I work to live, not live to work, so I may have signed my death sentence already?
An idea would be to tell them I can do that, work as a nurse and push beds when needed for more money, but I don’t believe it will work.
Another option: shamelessly half ass it till I get fired, look for something else in the meantime, like the main guy in office space.
Why is it so hard to find a job where nobody dumps more and more stuff for you to do for the same pay?
I no longer have any expectations of this employer. Want to fire me? fire me.
I remember seeing your earlier post about escalating your situation, so I’m referencing both when I speak here. Also, please keep in mind that I live in the US and don’t work in healthcare, so my experiences are all from that angle.
That clause in your contract is totally normal.
I’ve had a version of that same clause for every role I’ve worked - it’s a catch-all for “we might ask you to do a thing not listed, and when we do you need to do it.” Some places are more reasonable in their requests than others, but basically all of them (that I know of) have it just in case.
Your previous post mentioned that you would receive requests to help out other nurses when you had downtime between patients. That too is normal. Every workplace has its own norms and social standards, but a fairly common one is “if you have time to help others who are busy when you aren’t, do it.” That support is meant to swing both ways, but if a person routinely has a lot of downtime while others don’t, they may feel they’ve been unfairly targeted for extra work while others may simply see it as evening out the workload.
At the end of the day, your workplace is unlikely to change. It’s unfortunately going to come down to what you want to deal with:
I share your dislike of having more work assigned to you despite it not really being yours to do, but I’ve also chosen to just accept that this is part of working. An annoying part, but one I’ve learned to deal with.
One last thing from a fellow “please just leave me alone to do my work” person: I’ve found that if I occasionally volunteer to help someone in my downtime, they’re more likely to leave me in peace when they either see I’m actually busy or when I tell them I’ve been working all day and just need a few minutes to chill. That bit of proactive busyness on occasion has gotten me more downtime in the long run than trying to hide it ever did. (Just my experience, though. You do you.)