Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/518097
from a local community college, Rio Hondo College, par- ticipating in an "RN Transition course." Instead of officially hiring these nurses and placing them in California Hos- pital's traditional 12-week preceptorship that all new RN hires complete, these new nurses were expected to work two shifts, for free, alongside their precep- tors each week and were not guaranteed any employment when their "internship" ended after four months. When the staff RNs discovered these 11 "interns" were fully licensed but uncompensated nurses, they were livid. "You can talk to any nurse. They will tell you, 'This is outrageous! This is unacceptable,'" said Marina Bass, a 20-year RN working in orthopedics at California Hospital and a member of the hospital's RN professional practice committee. "This is a fundamental about nursing that everybody understood right away: How can you be defined and treated as a professional if you are working here and not being compensated?" Asked why they were willing to work for free when, as fully licensed RNs, the professional norm has been to move into a full- time, permanent staff position, the new nurses explained that they felt "desperate." Most of them had graduated from their various schools the previous spring, gotten their licenses last year, and despite send- ing out dozens of job resumes, gotten few or no responses. "I put out so many applications and I was never called," said another of the new RNs, who is the first and only nurse in her family so did not understand that the program was atypical. "This was my thinking, that we were going to be in clinical training and hopefully the hospital was going to keep us. Or the worst-case scenario was that if they didn't hire us, at least we were going to have some training and we can go do something else. I just saw it as the great- est opportunity." Unfortunately, situations like the one these new registered nurses experienced are becoming the new normal in nursing. While some hospitals do still hire new nurse graduates and invest staff time, energy, and money into 12-week hands- on preceptorships for them with sen- ior nurses to pre- pare them for work on the floor, these types of traditional new RN pro- grams are becoming very rare. During the Great Recession, when many hospitals stopped hiring, they subsequently eliminated their nursing edu- cation departments and new grad preceptor programs. Stranded without a job, many new, licensed RN graduates grasped at "This shift toward residencies and transition-to- practice programs is the hospital industry exploiting a crisis that it created." 16 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G A P R I L | M AY 2 0 1 5 This page: Excerpts from materials advertising Rio Hondo College's "RN Transition Program." Opposite page: In an email to National Nurse, the program instructor disputes that new RNs are working unpaid and claims students are still continuing in the class.