registered nurse

nursing assistant

nurse practitioner

physician assistant

hospitalist

Northern Light Health

Assisting nurse care managers in safe discharge planning of patients from the hospital. There is a lot of paperwork involved and a lot of order taking as well, but I personally have learned a lot about the medical field, not only the scientific aspects, but about the inter-workings of the behind the scenes (professional relationships, insurance issues, general business politics). I contact liaisons from different companies and find placement for patients either in skilled nursing facilities for rehabilitation, or with companies that will go into their homes and assist them getting back on their feet. There is a lot of networking and customer service that is done daily for this job.

My manager is great, shes firm but fair and always maintains an outside perspective. She gives great advice, helps to problem solve the most difficult cases-without telling her employees what to do or how to do their jobs, and she is always going to bat for her employees.

Like any work environment there can be personality clashes within a group, where I work in the hospital is no different. I have learned to adapt, adjust and have patience. Overall my coworkers are fantastic, always offering to lend a hand to each other, they help each other problem solve difficult cases and they lend an ear to one another when they have a difficult time with something. 

The hardest part of my job for me is juggling the 3 different personalities that I work with everyday. I work with three very strong, independent, very different women, and I am the assistant to all of them. Sometimes it can be overwhelming having to cater to each when they get busy, because they sometimes forget that I have all 40-50 patients on the floor and that I have something to do for each, However at the end of any particularly difficult day, they do to thank me for "putting up with them" or apologize if they were "being a bear" and one of the women at least once a day tells me how much she appreciates all that I do. So even on the worst days, the worst part of my job is completely manageable!

The most enjoyable part of my job is the interaction with medicine that I get, I have great ambitions that surpass my current employment and this has been a great stepping stone where I have been able to learn a lot from the three ladies I work directly with and all the nurses and doctors that come to our floor.

I started my career in psychiatric services here at Acadia hospital. When I was hired I was excited, my supervisor was incredibly supportive and easy going. I learned so much from her and had found a passion in the field. She ensured that all of her staff felt appreciated. She was unfortunately pushed out and replaced by my last supervisor before leaving. A quote from my former manager “we want you to be as busy as possible, if that means not having enough time to eat lunch the better.” Management is a bunch of corporate hacks trying to make decisions about people working in stressful conditions. They only make decisions based off of money, client care is never priority for them. Employee morale is boosted about once a year with a bbq and a free shirt if they make enough money. They expect a lot while they’re job is to sit in meetings and play around on Facebook for most of the day (while working from home of course), They also love sending emails, but 99% of the time they are passive aggressive and vague just to make you work harder. Oh did I mention how little they care about staff taking care of themselves? In my role I was supposed to have weekly supervision, that time was then used to point out all of the things I need to improve instead of talking about my concerns. Management will also make major changes to your job in meetings without including you in the meetings or asking for input. They will make sure that they can consolidate as many tasks onto one person as possible to save money. When you are overwhelmed and ask for support they will ridicule you and watch you like a hawk until you inevitably make a mistake. Then they will send nasty emails or instant messages to you about your job performance and expect you to work stress free. Some of the staff are very supportive and can teach you a lot, however, my time there I never truly found people I trusted as I always found there to be back stabbing and cowardice problem solving through management instead of through peer to peer contact.
I have nothing good to say about working here anymore. Management sucks the life and energy out of their employees and asks for more. To the ones who are still there I have the most respect for you.

Most of my time was spent updating old COBOL programs to meet new billing requirements for the hospital. Most programs had to be modified to meet new programming standards (modular design) and to remove outdated structures such as loops, GOTOs, etc. Occasionally new reports were added and new online systems were developed. Coworkers were always helpful and ready to look over code giving others problems (second set of eyes). I had some trouble communicating with my supervisor; I couldn't always understand what she wanted from me (e.i. when she said "You don't have to do it that way," it meant, "Don't do it that way...took me a while to figure that out)...degenerated to, "look at what everybody else is doing and do it that way," and, "you need to build cabins instead of castles."

When we stopped managing our own programs and bought Cerner and Siemens products and services, I was trained in their report writer, Ad Hoc. While trying to learn the limits of Ad Hoc and the data items made available to it, I was cautioned about using up too much system time and resources. I started making stupid mistakes, like forgetting to adjust dates before running reports for client departments like Accounting. Because of this, I was not allowed to train on other systems.

Because there were fewer and fewer programming assignments for me, I took inhouse classes and started teaching myself MS Access programming and started working up a database of Ad Hoc fields and the Ad Hoc programs (theirs and ours) that used them, so we could identify which programs we had written needed to be updated when Siemens changed or modified their systems. I was able to use this database a few times to help my manager manage updates to our home-grown programs.

Once it was decided I was no longer useful to them as a programmer, I was allowed to stay on the payroll while I took the prerequiste courses necessary to become employed with a company affiliate as a medical transcriptionist. During this time I continued to write and run Ad Hoc programs as requested and I was trained to scan and file documents for the Computer Security departement.

My employment was terminated on April 31, 2005.

From Home Health branch: strong local leadership in the Bangor office, supportive orientation pathway for clinical staff, strong culture of collaboration and support without shaming or finger pointing. High retention rate among rehabilitation therapists. Senior management is collaborative with local teams and routinely seeks input from field clinicians and mid-level leadership. Sometimes job demands affect work life balance, but that is likely in large part my own doing. 

Home care is a unique care setting with many rewards but also requires a lot of learning. It is a good setting for those who can remain flexible and like to be challenged in their clinical skills by working with a widely varied patient population. Not a good fit for someone who prefers very predictable scheduling or specific patient populations. The 1:1 quality care with patients/families cannot be beat. 

Branding and culture changes at the system level continue to trickle down to local agencies, and seem to be for the better. Opportunities to participate in system-level meetings at times reveals a genuine interest to strengthen and support staff to be able to provide excellence in evidence-based care to the patients we serve, which has been nice to witness. 

Really great talent team outreach to existing staff, providing many opportunities for personal and professional growth for those willing to seize them.

Overall a good company working on grooming from the inside out by strengthening its workforce, improving process efficiency, and focusing on evidence-based clinical care.

The supervisor for my shift in the morning would always be mean, wants way to much out of you, and expects you to take orders like a drill sergeant does to a private. not friendly unless you perfectly did your work the way she wants you to. Never happy to see you, constantly looks like she would rather be somewhere else than bossing slaves around. Never gave me any kind of positive reinforcement of any kind. ALWAYS "checking" on you to make sure you're working, but shes will use her time constantly to check on you, no matter what you are doing. MUST do the task she tells you no if, and's, or but's. Constant arrogance towards new hires, thinks lowly of them. She never happy to see you. Job has an awful seniority problem, expect to be fired within a year since you're and easy asset to replace. My supervisor was basically my boss, acted like the boss every day at the job even on the days my boss was working. My supervisor would always confront me in the break room when i would be on lunch, close the break room door and would scold me, and make me feel useless and got in my face while there were no people or cameras nearby, so her word would always take over mine (told my Human Resources department what she was doing to me and wrote it off as a lie). Also had to watch suicide patients when they came in, and wasn't on the job description. My boss didn't care that I had ADHD yet still made me watch the patients after i said i needed accommodations. Never work in housekeeping at the Waterville hospital. The benefits and salary don't make up how awful the management is, stay very, VERY FAR AWAY if you have a mental disability, you will not get accommodations. Its not worth the amount of blood, sweat and tears the supervisor will treat you and get away with it.

The paid time off is great, you accumulate about 7+ hours per 40 hours worked BUT this also causes a problem with frequent call outs. Management does not have contingencies to call-outs other than to just spread the missing persons work to everyone else. As you may have guessed that makes a difficult day especially with multiple call-outs. It is a rare thing to have days where no one calls out, in the past month there have been 3 days where we were fully staffed and when people are called they don't want to come in due to the large amount of daily stress and lack of compensation. 

Training was quick and minimal, more then a year later I am still learning things I should already know.

Most of the people that work there are great and fun but the stressful days cause them, and even me, to be less willing to help each other because we are tired, lack of breaks and large workloads.

The best part of the job is when we are fully staffed, even with surprise events on these days we all have time to adapt to fix them with plenty of help and minimal added stress. These days also give us time to have breaks, relax and communicate (whether it be personally or professionally). It would be an amazing place to work if it were managed more efficiently.

In short, I am actively looking for a new job as is practically everyone else, the department has seen and lost over 65 people in a years time due to bad management of the department and most of us have been penalized for not being able to compleat excessive workloads within the manager's requirements.

I worked for Northern Light Medical Transport and would work under the  Northern Light umbrella again without reservations. 

The company cares for employees, patients and what they do. Like all companies they can have budgetary issues that make things difficult but they ALWAYS make sure you have what you need and some of what you want. Initially the pay was suboptimal, the rate I separated at was was great. They are extremely supportive of continuing education and try to find ways to cover any you want, even things that don’t appear to directly benefit the company. They are protective of employees and will support you to the end if your in the right, if your at fault you will deal with the repercussions of your actions.

I left after acquiring acute anxiety and having a heart attack so my doc won’t clear me to ever be on an ambulance again. The company was extremely supportive and found a way to put me on medical leave. I am extremely grateful to have worked there. 

The biggest takeaway is this is a company that tries its best and has many great employees and opportunities.

I was very excited to start this job and training went really well,  but cracks started showing almost immediately. I work in the call center and I was never given a tour of the facility or introduced to any workmates aside from the one person I shadowed on a training day and my "work buddy" (the person that is there if you get hung up on something.) I've been there awhile now and I still can't match up the names with a quarter of my colleagues faces. There are constant changes within our procedure that aren't communicated to us until AFTER one of comes up against it. We were told we would start working remotely and after 3 people were sent home and 2 remote people were hired, the program stopped. There was zero communication for weeks while we waited to find out what had happened. We still don't know other than the "program is paused." At this point, we all realize that working from home is most likely no longer on the table even though no one will tell us that. There is zero transparency and there are corporate "hush hush games" here just like most other large companies. They just try to sugar coat it with feel good emails and "appreciation week" where we were all given a small bag of popcorn. Honestly, if it weren't for my direct supervisor, who honestly cares about her staff, I don't think most of the staff would still be there.

There is/was no training program or sequence for learning the Electronic Medical Record. It was trial and error, or watch me-now you do it, which is not a sound way to learn. I did learn much more medical terminology, vaccine requirements, acronyms with disease names I didn't know before I started. I had no idea the office handled the needs of people applying for U.S. Immigration until I started there since it was not in the job ad.  A typical day started out with the telephone ringing constantly and 3 to 5 patients arriving for appointments on the hour throughout the day. Sadly, there was little real teamwork until just before I left a few months after the Office Supervisor had already left, beginning an exodus of the already small staff. There was pressure to get done ON TIME, but often lacking support to allow this to happen! I found from others within the company, the way to make this position work was to do work on your own time- which I am not willing to do as an hourly employee. I did learn a great deal, worked very hard every day, but usually thought we did a lot for people needing our help as evidenced by the reviews/comments on the "i-Q" surveys.

I began working at the Northern Light Pharmacy as a Pharm. Tech. back in January 2022. I went through the month long process of jumping through the hoops to obtain employment with them. During the first few days, I had training to learn how to bin and the register. I was thrown into the job after a few days on my own with little training moving forward. In order to get the patients meds, update insurance and charge accounts a tech must have more training than just a week. When asking for help, I was passed around and told go ask someone else or got the stink eye for asking questions. Team player is not apart of this companies model even though they tell you that in the beginning.  

The filth that is in this pharmacy is beyond gross. They have a mice that eat the candy and dust is thick everywhere. Not the mention the pills that are laying all over the counter in the back where they distribute medication. Its never cleaned. If anyone was to know the truth about the level of filth, they would never get their medications refilled there.

The excuse of why its so bad is because its an old building and basically I was told no one cares because they plan on rebuilding but that has yet to happen. Until then people receive medication from a filthy pharmacy and a very disorganized place. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Registered nurse 8 salaries reported	$39.78 per hour
Nursing assistant 14 salaries reported	$25.52 per hour
Nurse practitioner 8 salaries reported	$52,375 per year
Physician assistant 4 salaries reported	$91,250 per year
Hospitalist 8 salaries reported	$225,000 per year

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