The Cultures of Nursing

jtweedie

The job duties, the vocabulary and the hospital were a far reach from anything I had experienced as a nursing student in San Francisco.

The ward of the hospital I was assigned to used to be a debtor's prison. This was culture shock. I was used to private and semi-private rooms. I felt like I was experiencing nursing history firsthand. Patients were in "Nightingale wards" with twenty to a room with each bed divided only by curtains.

The walls of brick did not contain the modern conveniences I was used to. Oxygen was brought in huge green canisters and placed by the patient's bedside when ordered. The canisters were extremely heavy and only the orderlies were expected to move them.

Medications had different names than in the United States, although sometimes the generic names were more familiar to me. Paracetemol was used instead of Tylenol and peppermint water was given for indigestion. And instead of sedatives for bedtime, some patients were prescribed a bit of sherry in the evening.

The newest task I had to learn was to serve afternoon tea. I learned to brew the tea the proper way and then arranged the teapot and tea cups and saucers to be taken to each patient's bedside. One afternoon a patient asked me when tea would be served. I replied, "I'll go and get the cart with the tea." The whole ward of patients laughed out loud. "A cart, you're going to bring the tea on a cart? That's what a horse pulls. You mean a trolley." I learned that lollies were candy, and jumpers were pullover sweaters. I called head nurses "Sister". The hardest part was deciphering the different Scottish dialects. In the close quarters it was easy for some patients to translate for me. The word I heard spoken most often was "ken". "I no ken" and "You ken?" New to me, I finally figured out that it meant "know" or "understand".

The whole experience, even the way I dressed and got dressed was different than what I had learned in nursing school. I had to go to the nurse's dormitory each morning to change into my starched white uniform and cap to walk to the hospital.

One morning I returned to a ward to see how a patient was responding to a medication he had been given. There was no response at all. There was no pulse, no respirations. Another nurse and I began CPR. As a student nurse, I'd learned but never used my CPR skills. This time it was for real. The code was called, the physicians and other nurses came, and the orderly with the huge green canister of oxygen arrived. Eventually the patient was resuscitated.

Most importantly I discovered that not everything I learned was different. Some things were merely part of the worldwide culture of nursing.

The Cultures of Nursing

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