Work frustration poll

Nurses General Nursing

Published

  1. Biggest source of workplace frustration

    • 51
      Patients/families
    • 56
      Direct co-workers
    • 158
      Administration/workplace politics
    • 27
      Other (please specify)

292 members have participated

Who is the biggest source of stress and frustration at your workplace?

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
the families get my vote!!! some of them are just plain, freaking nuts...

...

and stupid!

i gotta vote for the families, too. i wonder what the stats would look like if you separated out familes from the patients!

in nearly 3 decades of nursing, i've seen families hit, kick, punch spit on and shoot nurses. (i'm not kidding -- my friend bob got shot in the a$$.) one of my patients' husband took the nurse hostage in a dv dispute -- he wanted to finish off the job he started on his wife, but we'd moved her . . . that ended well for the nurse. i'm not sure what happened to the patient! i've been tackled (thank god for alert prison guards!) to protect me from a visitor with a home-made machete down his oversized pants. a colleauge of mine had a german shepard "service dog" sicced on him by a visitor who claimed dad didn't get enough "personal attention" from that "nice looking young lady" and too much attention from "that faggot there." the dog didn't bite him, but did keep him cornered in the patient bathroom until someone came to his rescue! and one particularly endearing gentleman threatened the entire staff with a 9mm hand gun because he wasn't sure his wife was recieving the best possible care. (management brushed that one off, claiming that "he's from montana, and everyone carries a gun there.") he did get arrested, but was out of jail 6 hours later.

one night when i had 15 hematology patients, one of which was coding and another of which was having an incompatible blood transfusion i refused to fetch a glass of orange juice for an able-bodied family member who was spending the night. the family pitched a fit -- but what was i supposed to do? ignore the abcs on my critically ill patients? the family called the paging operator to page a "real nurse" to the room to fetch the oj. management sided with the family . . . that's another pet peeve, but if the families weren't so unreasonable, they wouldn't have involved management over such a silly complaint.

my husband got a needle stick from an hiv+, hep c + patient -- he was drawing blood from her, she screamed and her husband decked mine while he was trying to draw the blood. this happened early in our marriage during the small window of opportunity we might have had for conceiving a child . . . so much for us having a child of our own. by the time he was cleared for the hiv, it was too late. if we enforced our own visiting hours and stopped catering to ridiculous requests from family, our jobs would be a whole lot easier!

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Management-administration has to come in first. A while back, my DON came up to me and talked about how we "have to have a positive attitude around the new nurses so they will stay." He stated that "some of the nurses who are orienting the new ones have a bad attitude." Well--I was the only one who had been orienting anyone recently. I didn't think I had a bad attitude but anyway. Then about a week later we had a nurses meeting. In the meeting he said, "Nursing department sucks." Literally, that is word for word. And --------I----------have a bad attitude????He went on about one evening where there were several nurses working on a certain unit, one nurse was orienting two other nurses and they THOUGHT an insulin didn't get given (it did, just about 15 minutes late) so he talks about "the nursing station where there were three nurses working and it wasnt ____station" (there are only two nursing stations) and went on to bash nursing and talk about how things arent getting done, blah blah blah. Well, I don't think any of us are sitting around on our A****s. Oh, I could go on and on forever but I will spare you the gorey details.

My feeling on this goes as follows:

Lazy co-workers ( it's not my job)

Office staff that will not answer a ringing phone

Residents that can help themselves and will not even attempt it .

Higher -ups who set all the RULES for us on the front line that do the work, they have no idea what it takes nor do they care .

Up Vote Up Vote ×

Today I'm going with co-workers. Get a load of this-co-worker is on modified (an yes I have empathy) d/t a back injury-she's not supposed to lift > 25 lbs. That's fine-but she won't answer her call bells, she won't do anything- now I'm nursing 16 pts instead of the usual 8-she gets an admission of a peptic ulcer-the guys hurling- and she says "can one of you go empty hsi basin-looking at vomit makes me sick"-why don't you just go home!!!!!!!!!

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.
...why don't you just go home!!!!!!!!!

I'm totally with you there. We have about a dozen nurses in our unit with permanent (or so it seems) weight restrictions of

Up Vote Up Vote ×

I feel like the people who work together should try and mesh. I have a lot of co workers that tell me they've done something and haven't. I found that 2 of the people I've relied on to help me figure out things are liars. Now I not only have to double check their work I have to try and figure out when they're lying. I don't like people who think they should be able to come in whenever they want, cuz the rest of us have to pick up the slack.

Management pisses me off too. They don't follow through with discipline rules, have fits over stupid little things and seldom listen to what we say. :uhoh3:

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in 5 yrs OR, ASU Pre-Op 2 yr. ER.

The (few, not all) RNs that have the holier-than-thou attitude, who will tell you to your face (repeatedly) that they think "nothing less than an RN belongs in the OR".

Oh, yes, and these are the same ones that whine that teamwork isn't what it used to be. Gee, i wonder why.

Doesn't affect my job, however it annoys me that people will go out of their way to be such jerks.

And set a prime example of what i won't be as an RN.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
TiddlDwink..:eek: surely you JEST !!!

we're allowed one apron per shift (!) I'm talking about a dialysis clinic, now...blood flies, spatters, and spills. Right...:rolleyes:

Maybe they'll ask us to start washing our gloves next and reuse them.....

If it weren't for the nurses and DON and our great patients, I wouldn't be there !

We have a nursing home in my area that decided to allocate one pair of gloves to each staff member. A CNA called the Health Dept and withing 24hrs it was surprise inspection time!

melissa

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Ante-Intra-Postpartum, Post Gyne.

I work in an office setting so my frustration might be different. I can't stand it when patients call for their medication and then ask if it has been fill like an hour later. (We have a 24hr refill policy even though most offices are more like 48 and we 90% of the time get it done the same day)

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Add a Comment