Whats your biggest pet peeve working in the ED?

Specialties Emergency

Published

Id have to say my biggest pet peeve is when someone hands you a medicaid card as they pull it from their Louis Vuitton handbag with bling on their hands after having rolled up to the ER in their Mercedes Benz! After that I'd say when someone comes to the ER for a UPT. Dont they know they are available at the dollar store now adays?

Specializes in ED.

"My kid is having an asthma attack, I've been giving him nebs all night and nothing worked."

Even though the child's K+ levels are WNL, and I can smell the cigarette smoke from outside the room. Liars.

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Press Ganey Score

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You are a Registered Nurse not a transporter. If all your peers agreed to not transport and wait for the transport person there would be delays all the time and management would have to address the transportation issue and not have RN`S doing ancillary work.

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Open plan ED`S so that the patients (ESI 3,4 + 5) can see the (ESI 1 + 2) patients. Have seen it work many times when there are multiple trauma`s from 1 incident so it spills out on to the main ED (Trauma Rooms full) these patients with non acute/non life threatning complaints stop complaining.

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When I came to ER (just finished up my 3 month orientation start of Dec.) I knew people came to ER for the smallest complaints. I had NO idea so many people came to ER for FOOD. Regardless of complaint, they all want fed. That's my big peeve.

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Specializes in Critical Care.
Aren't you supposed to chart what the patient says? If they say 10 that's what you're supposed to put down, not "eyeroll" and put down what you think it is.
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.....are you my former critical care instructor lurking? urgh cmon
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Oh ya and tin out of tin pain (spelled wrong on purpose to emphasize) chest/abdominal/back and you can't even start them triaged because they start demanding: I need a blanket, the telephone, a pillow, those footy socks, something for pain, something to eat, a taxi voucher, how long is this going to take. The turniquette is too tight, why don't you get discovery channel?

Oh another fav.. Women coming in for lady partsl problems knowing they will get a pelvic exam and they bring all their small kids.. Really??

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Specializes in Emergency.

Probably already mentioned but mine is "i can't swallow pills" and they're over the age of 6. Seriously? How do you eat? And yeah, that's what i ask them.

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Specializes in being a Credible Source.
I literally want yell at people when I ask them to rate their pain 0-10 and the tell me 12, 20, 50, whatever....I said 0-10, 10 is the worst people!!!! Not that big of a deal, but it drives me nuts!

More than that, I'm irritated when people start using fractions.

I already believe that 0-10 is much too fine a scale but then they start breaking out halves and quarters. Um, OK...

I think about it in quartiles... none, a little, some, a lot... that's sufficient for what we're doing particularly given most PRN orders either say "for pain" or "for mild/moderate/severe pain."

The decade scale is silly and a decimal scale is completely absurd.

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Specializes in Emergency, Telemetry, Transplant.
Probably already mentioned but mine is "i can't swallow pills" and they're over the age of 6. Seriously? How do you eat? And yeah, that's what i ask them.

No kidding. I understand that we have some horse pills, and I am willing to give them a pass on that. Sometimes, though, the pill is tiny and I have a 30 year old choking, gagging, and asking for a bucket. Maybe not a pet peeve, but very annoying.

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Specializes in Emergency, Telemetry, Transplant.

So basically every pet peeve listed here has been about patients, and I agree with the vast majority of them. However, I wanted to mention one that deals with fellow ER staff.

We all have annoyances with certain docs. There are some the move really slow--we will have patients who have been there for an hour and they are only seeing 3 patients. There are docs that take forever to give dispositions--all the lab work, rad test, etc. are back, the patient is sitting there getting antsy, and the doc is not doing anything to get the patient out the door. There is the doc that orders every possible lab, a scan, and then does an LP....for knee pain (OK, so the last part was a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you know what I mean).

Those just irritate me though, they are not real 'pet peeves.'

The pet peeve: staff (particularly non-licensed staff) who question the competency of the doctors. The doctors went to med school for 4 years. They had 3 years of an intensive EM residency. With a very few exceptions, they know more than I do and I darn well know that they know more that the techs and secretaries do about emergency medicine. Despite this, these situations have happened (names are changed to protect the innocent/guilty):

1. A doctor who is one of those docs known for ordering a gazillions tests for a simple CC calls the ID doc after such a workup. Based on his conversation with ID, the patient is going to be admitted with a dx. of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. One of the techs (one of the real obnoxious know it alls) says: "oh yeah, look at that. Leave it to Dr. Smith to make up some diagnosis like that just to make it look like he knows what he is doing for once." Uh, excuse me? Dr. Smith did not "make up" this disease (plus it was ID that 'gave' him this dx.) and Dr. Smith, although he is not my favorite doc, knows a heck of a lot more than you do.

2. Tech: "oh, we have to work with Dr. Harris today. She is such an idiot." Me: "Karen, I really don't think it is appropriate to call her that. She is good at what she does." Karen: "No, I don't like her. She is unsure of herself. She is an idiot."

3. Pt with left sided neck pain, no chest pain. Tech: "Why did Dr. Gold order an EKG? She is not having chest pain. This is just ridiculous. I am going to email Mary (our NM) because I am so tired of doing EKGs on all these people who aren't having heart attacks. This person I fine, I'm not doing this EKG."

4. Secretary to the charge nurse: "I refuse to work in that section today." Charge nurse: "Why? What is the issue." Secretary: "Dr. Williams is back there. He orders all these silly tests, makes me call doctors for no reason and really just doesn't know what he is doing."

(This is already a long post, so I will spare you all the details of the conversations that followed with the individuals who said these gems. Of course they are also the ones who, when you ask them to be more respectful towards others, say "but I have a First Amendment right to free speech." Ugh...not worth getting into that one!)

And it goes on and on. I'd hate to hear what they say about nurses behind our backs.

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Specializes in LTC, Family Practice, Meg/Surg.
So basically every pet peeve listed here has been about patients, and I agree with the vast majority of them. However, I wanted to mention one that deals with fellow ER staff.

We all have annoyances with certain docs. There are some the move really slow--we will have patients who have been there for an hour and they are only seeing 3 patients. There are docs that take forever to give dispositions--all the lab work, rad test, etc. are back, the patient is sitting there getting antsy, and the doc is not doing anything to get the patient out the door. There is the doc that orders every possible lab, a scan, and then does an LP....for knee pain (OK, so the last part was a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you know what I mean).

Those just irritate me though, they are not real 'pet peeves.'

The pet peeve: staff (particularly non-licensed staff) who question the competency of the doctors. The doctors went to med school for 4 years. They had 3 years of an intensive EM residency. With a very few exceptions, they know more than I do and I darn well know that they know more that the techs and secretaries do about emergency medicine. Despite this, these situations have happened (names are changed to protect the innocent/guilty):

1. A doctor who is one of those docs known for ordering a gazillions tests for a simple CC calls the ID doc after such a workup. Based on his conversation with ID, the patient is going to be admitted with a dx. of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. One of the techs (one of the real obnoxious know it alls) says: "oh yeah, look at that. Leave it to Dr. Smith to make up some diagnosis like that just to make it look like he knows what he is doing for once." Uh, excuse me? Dr. Smith did not "make up" this disease (plus it was ID that 'gave' him this dx.) and Dr. Smith, although he is not my favorite doc, knows a heck of a lot more than you do.

2. Tech: "oh, we have to work with Dr. Harris today. She is such an idiot." Me: "Karen, I really don't think it is appropriate to call her that. She is good at what she does." Karen: "No, I don't like her. She is unsure of herself. She is an idiot."

3. Pt with left sided neck pain, no chest pain. Tech: "Why did Dr. Gold order an EKG? She is not having chest pain. This is just ridiculous. I am going to email Mary (our NM) because I am so tired of doing EKGs on all these people who aren't having heart attacks. This person I fine, I'm not doing this EKG."

4. Secretary to the charge nurse: "I refuse to work in that section today." Charge nurse: "Why? What is the issue." Secretary: "Dr. Williams is back there. He orders all these silly tests, makes me call doctors for no reason and really just doesn't know what he is doing."

(This is already a long post, so I will spare you all the details of the conversations that followed with the individuals who said these gems. Of course they are also the ones who, when you ask them to be more respectful towards others, say "but I have a First Amendment right to free speech." Ugh...not worth getting into that one!)

And it goes on and on. I'd hate to hear what they say about nurses behind our backs.

Oh wow! Sounds like you work with a bunch of ***holes! I hate people like that, know-it-alls who really end up being the most uneducated idiots you've ever seen. They are so quick to judge others whom have a higher degree or more experience because they are secretly miserable with their own lives, whether its because they never went back to school and wish they had or they are just plain jealous of something that person has... It's awful working with people like that. You just want to knock some sense into them and say, "Hey, you want to act like you're in his/her shoes, then put in the work that they did and get those initials after your name. Then you can talk."

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