"Fired for NO Reason"

From what the OP said, it seemed to me that this new grad did not know or understand basic things that any students still in school should now.
Knowing to hold Coumadin on a pt w/ a really elevated INR is Nursing 101, IMO.

Actually, I haven't even started nursing school yet and I already learned this in Physiology class: INR should be between 2 and 3 for patients on coumadin. If this patient's was a 9, she must have been bleeding from every orifice. What do they do to treat this? Vitamin K shot? Platelet transfusion? Just curious.....

Hi,
I'd like to contribute my "Two Cents" to this post;
I am a newER (newer) nurse (graduated May 2007), who has been on a Telemetry unit since that time. I actually applied to this position before graduating since I had been there for 2 clinicals and really enjoyed the work environment as well as the challenges the patients medical issues presented me with.
As a new grad, when I started orienting on this unit, I was scared stiff, and couldn't make a move without my preceptor being there with me, because I was terrified of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, etc. All I could think was that if I made a wrong decision, I could harm or even kill someone. It was a very rude awakening to realize that no matter how much I learned in school, in reality, I knew very little, and had been in a well controlled environment in my school clinicals because the instructors are always there.
"Reality Nursing" is a very different animal...Now I had to really learn how to use every bit of data, resources, and especially my very new critical thinking skills to help my patients, and do it well (nursing is so very customer service oriented these days), so the patients and families are happy. Not an easy task for a newbie!!!
I have made mistakes (luckily not harmful), and gone through some rough spots, but I was very lucky (still am) to have a great support team on my unit. I hate when my ClinII says to me "We need to talk." because I know I have messed up, but I take the feedback and learn from it. A med error (and I've made a few), or a Customer service issue? The feedback about what I did is not really as important as the discussion about what to do so it does not happen again. I guess what I am trying to say is that as a new grad or even as a nurse with years of experience you need to take the critique and learn from it, know what not to do, and move on, hopefully making yourself a better nurse in the process.
I think the OP's point was that this person did not appear to learn from her mistakes which could create a potentially harmful situation.
Amy

Yes, good advice.

But also, I did see, as an older student, absolutely ridiculous behavior, and simple cluelessness at my last clinical, to where I pulled a doc aside and updated him on signs and symptoms I noticed, when seasoned RNs were all, "what is up with this patient, why is she so agitated, what a PIA she is!" Some clinicals you learn something from and others, you throw in the towel. It can be hard to find people like you OP, who do want to teach and care at all.

this is a very good thread. but it just reinforces why people need to take nursing as a career very seriously. sadly, people think "i'll just go to school for nursing" as a way to make a quick buck. i see it all the time with the nursing students and the prenursing students at my job. then when they are out of school it is a complete culture shock to realize the amount of responsibility that a nurse has and that yes, people really can die if you make a mistake. i see the cocky "i know that already" attitudes and honestly it turns me off from precepting. i was as a new grad and still am a very humble nurse willing to learn from who i can...nurses, docs, resp therapy, ot, pt., we all contribute to the outcomes of our patients and for that reason alone you will never know everything, it doesn't matter how long you have been in the field. i don't ever want to compromise patient care for the sake of ego.

I think this is the perfect example of why new grads are INVALUABLE! As the more experienced nurses are seeing what a PIA the patient is, you are truely using the assessment skills you JUST learned. While the more experienced nurses have seen this hundreds of times and nothing was wrong with the patient, they have grown jaded to the PIA patients and have forgotten that a lot of these are actual SYMPTOMS.

This very same thing happened to me when I was a new ICU nurse. Guy was really a PIA all night, I got this in report. THen 30 minutes later the guy died of a massive heart attack. That same night when that SAME nurse came back in for night shift, we told her what happened and she felt bad for not seeing it as a symptom. Yeah, the guy felt really bad ALLL NIGHT because he was dying and the nurse didn't even pick up on it.

Excellent post from a new nurse who "get's it."

The Op was expressing her opinion and observations concerning a specific type of new grad. We all know there are poor preceptors, unsupportive environments, and so on. But from what the op told us, this was not the situation in the specific case she spoke of. I think she was trying to stimulate introspection, self-examination, and a sense of accountability among new grads.
I feel that posters who have responded defensively have missed the point entirely.