Working every other weekend, holidays, and having to take call 3 times every 6 week scheduling cycle.
Shifts were only 7.5 hours with 1 hour mandatory lunch. It would've been better to have a standard 8 hour work day and make decent pay by adding that extra half hour, just like everyone else. One hour break was too long and felt like a waste of time that could've been used by working, being productive, and earning money.
Working alone in the clinic was not ideal. The solitude can get to you especially if you have only 1 or 2 patients in a whole day, have done all the clinic management you can do, inventory, etc. Social interaction is necessary for humans and being in a clinic all day by yourself is unhealthy.
In slower clinics, on average, there would be around 5-7 patients a day, and most of these would be immunizations/flu shots. At times, I felt my NP skills were wasting away.
Computers are slow and ancient. There would be frequent technical difficulties and glitches during patient visits, and it's frustrating when you want to be efficient but the only thing that's slowing you down is the ancient computer, broken printer, slow software, etc. If something needs to be fixed, you have to call IT yourself to fix it, and sometimes you can be on hold for 15+ minutes while the patient is there waiting to finish the visit. Not good.
On your off days, expect a phone call to cover a clinic far away because the practitioner called in sick. On your on call days, it's a gamble- you can get called in to a clinic a far distance from home whether you like it or not.
Changes were frequent, and sometimes not for the best of the employees, but simply for the best of the company. We used to have certain perks like CME days for part time employees, but they took that away. They also changed PTO accrual and made it harder to obtain. At the beginning of 2016, they had everyone start off with 0 hours- no hours carried over from the previous year.
HR was undependable- wrong messages were sent to MC employees, mixing them up with CVS employees and communicating misinformation which caused undue confusion.
There is high turnover in the company and I can see why. Didn't think I'd be part of the statistic, but after putting time in I realized it was not a sustainable career.
