New girl no more

SO now another new girl has started at the office, I can no longer play dumb and seek solace with my colleagues.

No more will the wounded new girl approach work, for now, I have to look as if I know exactly what I'm doing, even if I don't.

Don't get me wrong, I've grasped the nettle insofar as allocating nurses to shifts but it's all the other stuff that comes hand in hand with the operation that befuddles me.

When a nurse is allocated to a shift, that's exactly how I like it. When that nurse calls up and pulls out of the shift because she wants a longer one or a shorter one or one on a different day at a different time at a different place ... that's when I get the heebie-jeebies.

Multi-tasking is not my strong point. I like to keep mistakes to an all-time minimum and for that I have to keep myself focussed. And that's hard when the phones shriek relentlessly for staff to fill all those low-manned shifts.

It's easy to get sidetracked in this job but your mind has to prioritise accordingly. Granted, it's not helped when nurses drop in to bring their timesheets and want to stay for a chat. For a lot of the time, this is more than welcomed because that's when you get to hear the valued feedback from where we've sent them to work.

The flip side of that is trying to sound interested in maybe what family issues they're going through or how many hours they've worked that week or where they find the best place to buy a watermelon, when really all you want to do is find staff to find a whole new heap of shifts that have just come flooding in. Any unfilled shifts don't bring in the moolah and that's not what we're trying to achieve here.

So as new girl is shown the ropes that have just been shown to me, I'll be earwigging and trying to soak up a little more knowledge at her new working day expense. I just hope she doesn't ask me too many questions because I really don't know how many I'll be able to answer.

But then, I might even surprise myself...