registered nurse

licensed clinical social worker

psychiatric nurse

nurse manager

senior personnel specialist

Sierra Vista Hospital

Many of the reviews of this facility do not seem to be an honest and representation of the Sacramento facility. SVH can be a very challenging place to work depending on both your background and where you want to end up. My review is based off of my years of experience at SVH working as an MHT in each units.
  
 Job Work / Life Balance for MHT
The work itself is not hard. Most of your day is occupied by accounting and documenting for every patient ( 12-24 of them) every 15 or even 5 minutes. The hardest part will be adjusting abuse from aggressive irrational patients. This job is not for the thinned skinned or the hot tempered. Many other functions of the job such as running group therapy, performing EKGS, and patient care (showering cleaning ect.) are expected to be performed with almost no training. You are under constant surveillance which can get tedious as well. Co workers are just like they are anywhere else; some are lazy, hardworking, mean, kind ect. Balancing life and work will be up to you depending on your status as FT PD PT. They will work you as hard as you let them. But as a PD worker you may (not always) expect to be called of work a few hours ( sometimes minutes) before the start of your expected shift. This is know as LOW CENSUS. They also have a habit of sending people home at lunch.

Compensation/Benefits
Compensation is poor. I started and ended between 13-14 an hour. Other organizations will pay twice as much. FT expect raises around 30 cents a year, PD expect no raise. Many employees work here with the expectation to be hired somewhere else within two years. It is a great place to get your foot in the door in the medical field with little or even no experience. I am not familiar with the benefits. The running of the facility feels very cheap, with a lot of cut corners. And they charge you for lunches these days.

Job Security/Advancement
It is extremely hard to shake the feeling that you are highly disposable. This is due to the extremely high turnover rate and the low qualifications for the job.People come and go every month. Patients can be highly accusatory and volatile, they can easy get an employee fired who is not careful to protect themselves. MHT can advance to MHT II. There is little difference between these positions.

Management
Supervisors are generally good because they were recently promoted from charge nurse so they have a better understanding of the difficulties of working on the floor. But they are soon hired at another place and a new supervisor is being trained every few months. Managers seem out of touch with lower level employees like MHTS.

Job Culture
Many employees seem to just want to get through the day. Understandably so as high-needs patients and low staff stress the entire system and everyone in it. Some people feel like the facility is a scam others believe it does great work. Its for you decide because there is a lot of good and bad in what is done there. Some days are great and some are horrible. Most fall in between.

As a recent graduate, I thought this would be an amazing job. It was an absolute nightmare. First of all, for being a hospital, their medical insurance was a joke. I was paying $600 a month out of my paycheck for a medicore Kaiser plan for my husband and I. They give you the option for blueshield, but is more like $800 a month and is not a copayment plan....but only a percentage plan, so really you only have the option for Kaiser if you want some money left over.  Management was awful- they had gotten in trouble because case managers were too busy to take lunches, so instead of finding a solution, they just went around and had us sign a document saying that we would be fired if we didn't take our scheduled lunch.    They will literally work you into the ground and burn you out quick, which is why their turn over rate is so high. You would think for a being a psychiatric hospital, they would foster an environment in which their own employees could be mentally healthy instead of stressed out of their minds. Also, this is not the place you want to go if you are actually looking to learn clinical skills to be a therapist. You spend little time with the patients, the work you do end up doing is to appease licensing rather than actual therapuetic work....their treatment plans, groups, and treatment plans were a joke.

Extremely poor and incompetent management. Extremely high turnover rate. 
Staff is very unrelatable to their paitents and are extremely judgmental of the mental health population. 
No training is given and in return management becomes upset if you ask questions. 
Grossly detrimental to the mentally ill community.
 Sierra Vista was named the WORST mental health care facility in Sacramento in the Sacramento Bee! 
Several prior employees have sued based on lack of patient care. This information is public record and was found in the Sacramento County Court System.
The hospital management team does not care about the patients and influences staff to provide poor patient care to meet deadlines with very inaccurate patient reports.
Avoid working here your integrity and credentials WILL be at stake and management does not care.

Learning legalities of professional employees, such as doctors and nurses, credentialing certifications, conduct background, credibility as a professional, certified license information, any law suits, if guilty or not guilty, so they could renew their staff privileges. Helped reorganize the application and records system for the department. 
I was a sole Medical Secretary for the Hospital. 

I enjoy using my background in organizing medical needs for an office or hospital. Setting up Office manuals for conduction of the department and job descriptions. 

My most enjoyable part of my job was meeting the Many Doctors and Specialist form an other angle. Putting a name to their faces and voices. Enjoying the Meeting between the Doctors and case management cases and difficult case problems.

Come into work ready for any and everything.
I learned to be self sufficient and highly efficient by self-learning.
Managers provide unrealistic goals most of the time. You still have to meet these goals. This does create a greater you; however, might cause some employees to have resentment towards the employer due to being overworked.
SVH does provide higher chances of self-enhancement and opportunities for advancement due to high turnover rate. Great job to gain experience and learn a lot of new material.
Hardest part of the job for some people is to be prepared for mental challenges on the daily. It is a mental health hospital, which creates a different type of atmosphere than most other work places.
Most enjoyable aspect of the job is the family you gain so quickly as soon as you're part of the team. All the other staff members are very kind, helpful, and supportive.

Goal is to survive in an environment that does the minimum to protect its workers from dangerous patients. When someone calls off, there’s often no backup coverage for part or all of a shift. The staffing ratios of 1 RN for up to 19 - 26 patients at a time are ridiculous. Management gets away with it by calculating RNs that work in admissions and in management as part of the 1 RN to 6 patient ratio they claim, even though they’re not present on the unit. There’s a lot of stress. RNs are underpaid for the Sacramento market and mental health technicians are paid minimum wage. Earnings can be increased by working overtime, but it’s a quick path to getting burned out. They hire new grads and it’s churn and burn. Most RNs don’t stay past a year. 

As a MSW this hospital is very faced paced. You must learn to multi task or you wont survive. Case load of 12 at a time, you can also run groups which consist of 25 a group. Roles include case maangment for pts here, ex. housing, after care follow up appointments, conducting assessments, weekly check ins. You are expected to do it all. Don't ever expect to take a lunch here, there is just too much to get done in a day to take a break. I would recommend this place to anyone MSW starting out, you learn so much so fast. They will hire you with minimal expereice. Interview process took about 2 weeks. Panel interview of 2-3. Handed me a list of roles included in the position and asked me to speak to the roles I had  experience with. Called me back in 2 weeks offered the job. Expect to be thrown out on teh floor before any orientation. Get your experience and leave. Pts are a lot to deal with, can be scary at times.

(See summary) many problems with this place (although I imagine most are probably in line with greater systemic issues) and NOT the type of spot that most will want to find themselves at long-term (management is up front and honest about that), however, if you can manage to work hard in a hectic/fast-paced/toxic environment and tolerate the grind that is case management I believe this is a quality employment opportunity for new graduates or social workers looking to get exposure in mental health field.

The pay is decent, but they work you hard. You need good boundaries and need to know how to stand up for yourself otherwise they will ask everything of you and walk all over you. If you work on a good unit and are able to build rapport with your co-workers great, but if not you are put in the middle of BS drama from differing departments. Management has thankfully changed since I was there, I was yelled at by managers for things that were not my fault. 
Every job has it's cons, but if you can grow through the B.S. and set boundaries with management, nurses, and doctor's it's not such a bad place. I've been in places where the clinical expectations are sub par, but here the whole team will support you in setting boundaries with the patient and it can be a no B.S. zone.

I worked here for 4 yrs. This hospital is severely understaffed in the field of mental health techs. The turn over rate for mental health tech is a joke. The CFO only cares about sending as much money as possible to corporate. The food is horrible no flavor and bland. The hospital is a revolving door for patients, it's usually the same patients over and over. The doctors walk "not all" walk around with god complexes and even some nurses act like that. As for nursing staff excluding the director they are great, and fun to work with. Oh yeah you work your butt off for your yearly evaluation score high to get a raise of .5 cents. Corporate greed...

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Registered nurse 5 salaries reported	$51.10 per hour
Licensed clinical social worker 2 salaries reported	$57.50 per hour
Psychiatric nurse 5 salaries reported	$52.50 per hour
Nurse manager 1 salary reported	$115,000 per year
Senior personnel specialist 6 salaries reported	$27.00 per hour

Working at Sierra Vista Hospital: Company Overview and Reviews

Sierra Vista Hospital

Sierra Vista Hospital Ratings

Popular jobs at Sierra Vista Hospital

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected