Staff are so miserable at work that the facility has constant turnover and those that stay due to tuition needs openly fantasize about quitting nearly constantly. Our manager is always absent - either on vactation, hiding in her office, or outright avoiding responsibility and decisions.
Nurses with associates degrees continuously receive pay increases and bonuses while Mental Health Partners with B.S. and even M.S.W. degrees are paid 15 dollars an hour and are repeatedly told it is "competitive" and that VCU health cannot afford to increase pay.
Patients are not provided with quality, or even adequate care at our facility - they are continuously readmitted for the same symptoms, overmedicated for those symptoms, and discharged because our method of operation refuses to treat the underlying causes of mental health issues and instead treats them as medical conditions that can be taken away by medications without therapy or support.
Patients and their families frequently articulate how dissatisfied they are with the services they receive at the facility, and nothing changes, simply because our facility is "better" by comparison to the next more negligent and poorly run facility.
Direct Care Staff have repeatedly brought up all of these issues in staff meetings, nursing meetings, etc and have REPEATEDLY been silenced and dismissed by management, human resources, and other "authority" figures. Staff have been punitively reassigned for speaking out about the conditions at the facility, and management took away our ability to email each other to stop employees from organizing.
I am ASHAMED to work here, and only continue to do so because without this job I could not afford the education I need to be able to get out of the system that perpetuates this type of negligence and improve it.
