Friday 26 January 2007

Shambles

OMG! My nursery is so unbelievably useless I cannot believe it!

This week I have done 2 and 3/4 hours overtime - I had agreed to do 1 and a half!! This is how it went...

Wednesday I turned up to be informed that one of the girls in our room had holiday booked for Thursday and Friday. This is a problem because another member of our staff doesn't work Thursday afternoons or Fridays at all. This left me and another girl to work alongside agency and releif staff, who don't know our children so can't do much other than what we ask them to do which is also limited to feeding bottles and cuddling them... we have to do the nappy changes, make sure the milks are done on time, give feedback to the parents etc. So being down from 3 staff to 2 makes a lot of difference! Add on top of that the fact that the other girl was on an early shift and left at 3:30 and most of our babies leave after 5:30 - often as late as 6pm this was a BIG problem. On top of that I am still not police checked, I have no qualifications and having only been there 2 months I still haven't done a late shift and had never been left in charge of them room... but for two days running I have had to make sure everything is done properly and on time with random members of staff coming in and out of the room all the time!! And because of this I ended up working lots of overtime!

And it has really stressed me out. Yesterday I turned up to work to find that the unit co-ordinator (who is to become our manager - something they lied to us about completely I might add!) had forgotten to put me on the rota and because she had moved one of her "strong" members of staff (strong as in actually works hard and puts the babies first) into my unit and she needed a strong member of staff in her unit I was going to be working in her unit until 2:30... how much sense does that make?? I had to give feedback to parents on children I hadn't even seen for half of the day!!

And then when I told her she *had* to send someone who was police checked to my unit to help me she kept sending people who were leaving 15 minutes later... meaning I had to keep telling new people the names of the babies, how things work in our unit etc etc...

But that was nothing compared to today!! I made so many mistakes today!! Some of the milks were an hour and a half late, I forgot I had sent the relief member of staff to make milks (and she took 40 minutes doing so whilst chatting GRRRRR) and so I left the agency worker in the room with the babies and a parent on their own (which is a massive no-no) to go change a nappy for said parent...

Then because there were still about 2 babies in the two units and members of staff were rapidly going home as their shifts ended we had to rush the nappies and join the two units up and clean up and rush around like mad and the nappies got held up and I then realised that some hadn't been changed for 5-6 hours!!! omg!!! I felt sooooo bad...

And the worst part is someone told me to make it up (we get quite a lot of spineless people working there who would rather lie than face up to a mistake - it p*sses me off BIG TIME!! These are children for God's sake - you can't lie about it!!!). I told them what I thought to that and if the company or the parents get on my back I will accept I made a mistake but I will also be non-too polite about what I think to their policies and leaving me in charge of all this - there is no way one person can do all I had to do and get it all right... I know this... but at the same time I feel awful because those babies were in my care and I failed to give them all they needed...

I can cope with being put upon and the long hours but I cannot stand for the ways the babies get messed around. HR have sent loads of people this week to make changes - but their changes involve changing the units and staff around when they know nothing about the babies and some of them I wonder if they have ever worked much with children - for example a "specialist" today woke a baby who had chicken pox - yes chicken pox is also going round our nursery atm - just because his leg was hanging out the cot through the slats and she thought this was far too awful to leave - and he cried and cried and cried - and just when he'd settled she did it AGAIN!!!

omg I am sooooo royaly p*ssed off right now!! If I didn't love the babies so very much I'd be applying for every job under the sun to get out of this place - it prays on my conscience far too much - I have been waking up numerous times in the night these past few weeks... but I love my babies far too much to leave and some of the people I work with are wonderful too... and I do love getting up and going to work and seeing them - so much - and talking to the parents is great... I just wish there was something more I could do - this nursery really needs a kick up the backside... I am dreading a day when something major happens and it all falls onto our heads. That sounds awful - I'm not just thinking of my career here - the children's welfare obviously comes above anything else in my book... I just hope it is just this one nursery and it's not like it everywhere...

So do I stay or do I go? I have a lot of thinking to do...

No comments: