One nurse, ten years, day shift

Who

A registered nurse in the United States: ten years on a medical-surgical unit, day shift, still working. I did not leave bedside nursing to sell courses about it.

Nobody pays to be on this site, there are no ads, and no investor is waiting for it to make money.

Why this exists

Most of a shift never gets talked about. I don’t mean the codes and the drama. I mean the sixth alarm in an hour, the thing you were told in report that turned out to be wrong, and the form nobody can explain because the incident behind it happened years ago.

Short animated episodes are how I say it. A nurse watches one, recognises the unit and sends it to a coworker. The jokes are about the system and how it treats the people working in it. They are never about patients.

How the episodes get made

The characters are drawn by code, not taken from stock art or a video generator. Poses, faces and badges are all settings, so the same characters look the same from the third episode to the hundredth.

I write the episodes, put them together and post them between shifts.

How the charting notes are checked

The charting notes are the one part of the site that makes claims about the real world, so they follow stricter rules. They use three kinds of source and keep them apart:

• Court decisions from CourtListener. Only these can support a claim about what a chart cost somebody, and every one is linked so you can read it yourself.
• Published guidance from professional bodies, regulators and insurers. A piece of advice counts only if two unrelated sites give it.
• Forums, used to learn what nurses ask and how they word it. A forum post is never used as a fact.

Before an article goes up, a script checks it, and if any check fails the article is thrown out:

• Every case it cites has to be in the research file for that topic. Language models asked for “cases with links” will make up cases with real-looking numbers, and lawyers have been sanctioned for filing them.
• Every quoted sentence has to appear, character for character, in the decision it comes from.
• If only a search result was available and not the full opinion, the article can name and link the case but cannot say what the court decided.

The same checks run again after the text is edited for readability. When no decision fits a topic, the article says so. How this guide is made has the full method and the list of corrections.

How the study guides are built

The study guides for nursing school don’t contain clinical text written by me. Every key point is a sentence copied exactly from an open OpenStax nursing textbook, a script checks it against the book, and each page links to the section it came from.

Textbooks have mistakes too. When a sentence is plainly wrong, such as a valve on the wrong side of the heart, it is left off the page instead of quoted. Each practice question has to rest on an exact sentence from the same section, and a script checks that too.

Once a month the guides and the pay tools are checked against what they rely on: FDA drug safety notices, exam plans and federal rates. Anything that changed gets fixed.

What this is not

It is not clinical, legal or financial advice. The charting notes describe what has happened to other nurses and how to write a clearer note. Your state board, your facility policy and, if it ever comes to it, your own lawyer are what you actually answer to.

The episodes are fiction. The unit, the people and the events are made up. No real patient, coworker or employer is in them.

Why my name isn’t here

I work in a hospital, and some of this site is critical of how hospitals run. Nurses have lost jobs over less. My name also wouldn’t help you check anything: the court decisions are linked, the reasoning is on each page, and the calculators cite the laws they use.

Why it is free

The report sheets, the shift calculator, the contract decoder and the charting notes are free and need no account. Nurses already pay for licence renewals, continuing education and the stethoscope that keeps walking off. Some of these tools are sold elsewhere, and I don’t think they should be.

What you type into the calculators stays in your browser unless you choose to email the result to yourself. Everything the site does store is listed on what this site collects.

Getting in touch

Write to [email protected]. I read every message myself. If something here is wrong, especially in the charting notes, tell me where and I will fix it.