Got an offer for a home health case manager job, 7 years med-surg before this. Base is about $4 less an hour than I make now, but it's Monday through Friday and they pay mileage at 67 cents. The catch is on-call one weekend a month plus one weeknight a week, and the on-call pay is a flat $150 for the weekend, plus your hourly rate if you actually go out on a visit.
The manager was honest that some weekends you get zero calls and some weekends you're driving 90 miles for a pump alarm and a death visit at 2am. Productivity is 28 points a week, and nobody could really explain to me what a point is.
Part of me is so done with 12s and missing every other weekend. Part of me thinks I'm trading one kind of tired for another. Home health people, is that call schedule normal? And how bad is the charting from home really?
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Post replyMy first on-call weekend I did a death visit at 1am, then a foley at 6am two towns over, then a pump alarm that turned out to be a dead battery. Got 4 hours of sleep and had a full schedule Monday. Some months are quiet, but plan your life around the bad ones.
Is the $150 flat for the whole weekend or per day? Because if it's the whole weekend for being tethered to a phone for 60+ hours, that's rough math.
Counterpoint, I did 6 years of med-surg and went to home health and I'd never go back. Yes, some on-call weekends are brutal. But I eat lunch, I pee when I want, and nobody is screaming at me about a bed that needed to be clean 20 minutes ago. Different tired is still tired, but it's my tired.
The on-call is normal. The charting from home is the real catch. Nobody tells you that 'flexible hours' means OASIS at 9pm on your couch every night.
Ask them for the actual point sheet before you sign anything. At my agency a SOC was 2 points, a revisit 1, a recert 1.5, and that is exactly where they get you. If your caseload is heavy on admits, 28 is doable. If it's all revisits spread across three counties, you're working Saturdays to hit it.