New role - on boarding

[Cupofchai22]

So, I'm looking for opinions here. I am a very experienced nurse now working autonomously in a community setting. I started the role end of February. I had 2 weeks of induction which consisted of becoming acclimatised to their business (non NHS). Following this my caseload of patients grew and grew till now I am pretty much at capacity. My concern is I have had one, one to one in this time with a manager. I have supervision in a group setting on a monthly basis and that's it. My patients are vulnerable (DA/mental illness/addiction) and so forth. Is this normal for one? I am in a small team of three and two of the colleagues are using some fictitious patients on their documentation to make their case load look busy (I looked into this as I thought something was amiss and it is clearly obvious when you look). However, nobody is checking just looking at the overall figures.

On thr whole I enjoy the job, work/life balance but none of this sits right with me. My probationary period ends at the end of this month for which I have a meeting. I'm not going to call my colleagues out but....

Any advice on this one?

That sounds normal providing you do get your hour of line management a month plus enough supervision. I would ask for 1:1 supervision as well for a few months until you’re confident in the client group.

Your colleagues are gaming the system (which I’d ignore) but what I would take from that is that you must not go over your capacity and you must push back if you’re asked to.

Hope it starts to feel better soon

I’m a clinical lead btw ^^

@LaurieFairyCake thank you. So, you'd ignore the fact that colleagues are making themselves look busy, getting praise for being busy when they're not? When in fact my caseload of patients is heavy and 'real'. Not questioning just wanting to confirm that you would ignore it. Obviously I dont want to rock the boat.

Oh I wouldn’t ignore it (but it’s my job to find it out 😬) if I were YOU and new and still trying to work out the lay of the land I probably would until I’d been there a while.

@LaurieFairyCake thank you. You're right. I'll sit with it a while and see how it all unfolds. Thank you for your input. 😊

I work community healthcare and get a supervision session every 6 weeks, but our clinical leads are usually on-hand for any ad hoc support I need in-between this (for the whole team we have a good ethos of chipping in and supporting with the "I have no idea what to do next with this guy" situations community health tends to delight in bringing you!)

Biggest thing someone taught me when I was new was not to get drawn into the trap of playing whack a mole with every new referral that comes in - know your capacity and don't take on beyond that because the referrals will keep coming in whatever you do.