my friend just finished her BSN 2 years ago, working 32 hr/week making $60K with benefits nm

• Have any of you ever thought of court reporting? sm - Penguin
  • Court Reporting - llwynn
    • Software used with Court Reporting Machine - Steno Secretary
  • I checked it out recently (sm) - MT
    • The thing that really interested me is the sm - Penguin
  • From what I have heard, harder to break into than - MT.
  • I'm learning scoping, and its quite interesting, instead of CR -- nm - Sara
    • Link to scoping infor, if interested - Sara
  • Nope. If I wanted to work outside the home, it certainly would not - tired of sitting on my backside
  • Would like to exchange notes..sm - amie
  • I don't want to work that hard! OR learn somethingn new. nm - Becky AKA Old Dawg
  • court reporting - no name
  • My husband is an attorney and suggested the same thing to me once. - sm
    • I wouldn't recommend it... - D
      • They have one of those Stenomasks on Ebay. It's funny! - stenomask
        • yikes - Saras
      • Speech recognition in court reporting - MTness
      • I tried to transcribe one of those - PJ
      • That's right...sm - former CR student
        • Do you use your steno machine to transcribe? nm - D

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and with a really good incentive plan.  I live in the Kansas City area.  $10 seems like a low starting point even with only two years experience which is the usual benchmark for hospital MT jobs. 

It's been my experience that the low end of the pay scale for hospital employed MTs was around $12 an hour.  Also, it's been my experience that the pay offered is usually based on years of experience and how well you perform on the transcription test.

I would say if their pay is that low, they should at least be making it up with incentive and it doesn't sound like they are.

JMO

exactly what she meant, but I think it means pretty much what you said...once something is not a challenge anymore or the "new wears off", for some personality types boredom sets in.  I know it does for me.  I have often thought I may have mild ADD as well, you might have hit the nail on the head there. 

I feel like I can't get out of this rut of making enough money to just pay my bills and nothing left over.  What would you say the average annual salary should be after 2 years of acute care work?

Thanks

We got one hour of PTO (paid time off) for every 10 hours worked, so that's just a little less than 3 weeks a year. We had a 401K that was pretty decent, good health insurance, life insurance equal to two years' pay, and they offered AFLAC and disability insurance as well.

Oklahoma's cost of living is among the lowest in the nation....I don't know how people living in California can make it on $8-$12/hr.

are making this kind of money? I've been in this profession for over 20 years and the MOST that I ever made in a given year was $50K working for a service and that was with loads of off-the-clock overtime.  Where I work now the majority of decent work is being offshored and the American side MT's are left with terrible work to wade through.  A 'good' check for me now would come out to the equivalent of about $10 an hour!

I can see how folks who have their own accounts could make the type of income range above, but working for a service?  What is it that the rest of you now that obviously I'm totally missing???

Now it seems, I'm just scraping by, juggling the utility bills and paying whichever one has sent me the 24-hour disconnect notice this month; it's become a grim miserable job compared to what it was.  I'm nearing retirement age, but I doubt retirement is going to be in my future for a very long time.

The single worst thing that ever happened to us was going from the gross line count to the character count, and not adjusting the line rate upward to parity -- not to mention the adjustments that should have been made to accommodate all the extra time spent struggling to make sense of huge increase in ESL dictations that has occurred over the last 15 years, and of course there should have been COLAs as well, which we all know has not happened.

In the 1980s, with the advent of powerful and affordable PCs, free lance transcription became much more common.  So if you were experienced, disciplined and organized, you could be much better off economically by working for yourself -- although there were definitely advantages to working in-hospital.  There were great benefits and the salary was indeed enough to support a small family (albeit very modestly.) 

For a number of years during that time, many of us worked part time in the hospital for benefits, but made our real money at home.

But in my case, the time came when it just made no economic sense to work in-housel, I was better buying off buying private insurance for major medical care, tax-deferred annuities, and self-insuring the little stuff. 

I would just pick up tapes from the hospital every morning, and drop off the work (which I printed out) from the day before.

I usually had 24 hours to transcribe tapes which I did during school hours, when things were peaceful and quiet. 

I transcribed a couple thousand GROSS lines day.  Every single character line counted, so by taking advantage of headers/footers, creative macros, word expansions, etc., I really boosted my productivity far beyond to what I could do in-house on the self-correcting Selectric, Wang or Mag Card, or whatever 10-years behind technology was currently being used, plus all the office distractions and politics, and I definitely did not to have to work 24/7 to earn a good living. (Oh how I loved WP5.1!)

In fact, 2000 gross lines a day, 5 days a week at 10 cents a line (courier 10-pitch font, one-inch margins) was very very do-able for an experienced productive acute-care MT, provided she had good equipment, good reference books, and stayed focused.  It would take about 5-6 hours a day to get that amount of work done.  So figure the math out for yourselves, that's just a tad under $50,000 a year, certainly not a high standard of living in those days but adequate when it meant you could stay home and be actually be a full time parent when your children were home from school, and very comfortable, if you were married with a working spouse, or had rerliable child support, or social security for your children (if you were widowed.)

If you chose to work some weekends and evenings, it was not that all that difficult to hit that $75,000 a year mark, which I did for a couple of years so I was able to pay the tuition at a good boarding school -- and cruelly thwarted my teen-aged son's only ambition in life, which was to become a high school drop-out.

Things have gotten bad, no doubt about that, and the worst part of it is, is that most of the big MTSOs are still charging the hospitals as much as we used to earn, and sometimes even more, but the MT is no longer earning it, and often can't get enough work to meet the line counts required by the MTSOs for benefits (although the cost of those benefits are reflected in the cost charged to the hospital.) 

I don't know what the answer is, as the electronic immigrant is such a huge threat.

It's pretty darn awful, and I feel very very bad for those of you starting out in this field, and I do hope things change for you (and that someday soon I can retire.)

And the point that the person made is that that she was worth $75,000 a year, not necessarily that she was getting it or could get it, and I absolutely agree with her.  This is a hard tough job if it's done right -- it's mentally tiring, it's hard on your back, your hands, your neck (and your behind.)

It requires a lot of time -- it requires focus, you must stay alert, and must give 100% of your attention to what you are doing 100% of the time, it takes education and brains -- and now a word of truth which my 35+ years experience gives me the right to say aloud -- it's not fulfilling, wonderful, lovable and enjoyable, it's often as repetitious and tedious as an assembly line but infinitely more frustrating.

PS: I recall one of my colleagues from those early years of my career, now gone from this earth, telling me that the 1960s were really the "fat" years, that things actually began to decline salary-wise, in real dollars, in the 1970s. 

Definitely need an external keyboard and I would also recommend an external mouse instead of using the touch pad, unless you have a keyboard that has a touch pad.    Unless you plug in an external monitor too, the smaller screen may be an adjustment, although several of the newer laptops have 17 to 17.5 screens now.   A major plus to a laptop is if the power goes out and you download via wav files you can work, at least for a little while, using the battery.   I have cable internet, but I also get 20 hours/month dial-up with that, so I can use the dial-up to download/upload and use my battery to work for 3+ hours.   You can also get  an inexpensive inverter to plug into your cigarette lighter in your car and plug your laptop into that to charge your battery, or use for working in the car while traveling.  I have a box about 1-1/2 inches tall that all my power cords plug into and I have my laptop sitting on that and it makes it the right height for typing. 

Laptops generally run considerably more than a desktop, though you can find a decent laptop now for $800.00 or less, though most will run you around $1000.00/more depending on what bells and whistles you want. 

An MS4 is a med student till June graduation. He's "Mister So-and-So" then in June when he graduates, he's "Doctor So-and-So."

A 4th year resident is something else entirely. He is an R4 (or that's what they call them here). HE is an MD. The MS4 is not an MD.

I worked outside of the house for one year after my first boy was born.  I hated leaving him.  So I was home working by the time he was a year old.  I really enjoyed it.  10 years later, I'm still working at home, and have a 6 y/o boy too.  Both my kids are in school.  I'm so thankful to be home so that I can get them off the bus, attend parties at school, go on field trips with them.  I can take care of house chores and keep and eye on my three dogs.  The only thing is sometimes I miss being around people, being able to leave my work at my job (at home it's here all the time).  My hubby works midnights, so he's home during the day too, but sleeps.  Sometimes I feel like I have no "me time".  After my boys get a little older, I may get out of the house to work.  Sometimes I would like to actually change my career to sometime more hands on with patients.  I love the medical field, I've been doing transcription for about 14 years.  Another plus for working at home with kids is if they are sick, you don't have to call out of work.  You can do your job and take care of your kids.  You don't have to look your best either, on those days or any days.  I'm guilty for sitting here in my PJs a lot, not having any makeup on or hair fixed. 

Good luck in the future.