I recommend Evergreen to nurses and MD's I have met, but MSW's: to please stay away. This company is far from egalitarian, and MSWs are at the bottom of the ladder. I find this odd since there was a massive walkout before I was hired, and Evergreen spent a lot of unnecessary money on traveling MSWs. You would think they would learn their lesson, but they haven't. People are cordial when the hospital is not full, but as soon as the hospital becomes full (which is more and more the case), care teams can become verbally aggressive and manipulative. They talk behind your back, and no one seems to have mastered the art of direct communication. We are supposed to take all of the verbal aggression from MD's, but are not given any grace if we are unable to fulfill a task in the physician's or RN's timeline. All of this is pretty typical for a hospital; however, even the per diems that work for multiple hospitals say that Evergreen lacks organization, and MD's can be entitled. Save yourself the burnout and apply to UW instead.
The worst part of this job is that social work management is pretty terrible. If you are someone who likes to just keep your head down and work, this job would be fine for you. But if you are at all into social justice or expressive, the manager will target you. She has now quiet fired three people, all with similar personality types, for minor offenses. I was quiet fired for making a typo in a note and being tardy (which had previously been commented on once and not enforced for the two years I had worked there). She is also very inconsistent. In the same meeting, she told me that I need to be more communicative with providers and write more detailed notes; however, a month before told me to tell providers less information about our workflow because it will confuse them. She usually changes rules and priorities monthly via in-person meetings but then does not document changes discussed in said meetings, leaving half of the staff in the dark. She will also tell one person a new expectation, hoping it will disseminate to the rest of us (it often doesn't and causes more confusion). Her approach changes greatly depending on her mood. She will stress the importance of taking time for yourself, upholding boundaries with the care team, etc. However, once she becomes stressed, she will push against your boundaries, expect you to stay late, take the provider's side when you try to enforce a boundary with them, etc. Also, what kind of social worker is anti-union and doesn't believe in conflict theory?
To be fair to my manager, she has an incredibly high-stress job. Much higher stress than mine. I think it would be hard for anyone to stay organized and calm all the time. However, that does not excuse her from taking accountability and apologizing or acknowledging her behavior switches. She recently hired a supervisor underneath her, so things may change in the future now that the manager I worked with isn't interacting with us as much, and she can delegate more tasks. Though maybe not. She quiet fired the last supervisor for making one mistake in three months.
