Are we forcing team work but shying away from relationships
Over the years there have been many changes for the better in healthcare and nursing. Along the way we have lost the natural ability to work as a team and we are reluctant to socialize with each other outside work-is there a connection with the 'poor' team work many of us experience.
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How to balance work and home life has been a challenge. As a nurse, I do not know how I have done it through the past 24 years. I have encountered many obstacles and challenges along the way and it doesn't get any easier even with all the practice I have had.
The hours as a nurse are often long and not conducive with the 'normal' person who often works 9-5 with clear defined breaks and every weekend off. When I was younger I only hung out with other health care professionals or other emergency service staff because we all worked horrible shifts, every holiday known to mankind and we were all kind of crazy.
Back when I started nursing, shops didn't open on a Sunday and they closed early during the week. Shops didn't open on the major holidays and there was no such thing as a 24 hour openings.
This meant that nobody in society actually understood the hours nurses kept or the concept of shift rotation. We would go out partying after work; there were social clubs just for us. We talked 'shop' all the time; we laughed a lot at work and at play. It was fun or so it appeared all the time. We worked hard and we played hard, and we laughed a lot. Most nurses worked rotational shifts; we worked 8 hour shifts which could mean a 10 day straight if you wanted a weekend off, you would work a mixture of earlies and lates during that 10 day straight. We also worked 6 weeks days and 2 weeks nights. We all moaned and complained when we went on nights but we had no choice we had to do what we were told.
If you had a family some nurses had to give up nursing because they could not manage child care and working the shifts. Nursing was defiantly not child friendly unless you had fantastic home support you could not work. Often Managers and charge nurses would go part time and drop back down to being 'just' the RN on the floor. There was no fast track to nursing in those days and managers had been floor RNs for many years themselves before promotion. Child care was either done by family, a nanny or child minder or you paid through the nose for sending your child to child care facilities, and they were not nurse friendly and often opened way after your shift started.
I think this is easier in today's society because a lot of jobs now have shifts and strange hours so child care facilities and child minders have to be more flexible.
What I have noticed over the years is that having a baby now does not mean a loss of career with new mothers often returning to work very quickly after the birth of their baby.
Most career nurses don't step down out of their charge or managers position, so less promotion and movement of staff. Rarely do we socialize outside of work, the social clubs have disappeared and we don't seem to have a lot of fun in our everyday life.
Moaning and complaining have taken over the laughter and fun we would have even when we were run off our feet. Nurses will often frown on other nurses who appear to be laughing and having fun, often believing they can't be working as hard as they are, or their assignment must be unfair.
Social activities outside work are rarely planned as we don't always like our co-workers so why would we go out with them. Years ago if you made a list or a plan everybody was involved today few write their names down and it is always the same ones. I know I am generalizing, before you shoot me down.
As usual I am giving you food for thought, are we as a nursing society so detached from each other that we do not have fun together so we cannot work better as a team. I ask this because we work so hard now to get each other to be team players, yet years ago we all worked together as a team is this because we connected more on a social level or was it because moaning and complaining was not tolerated so you didn't do it? Team work was a expectation and we didn't seem to work on it, formal education was not needed!
We are all so much more educated, we expect more from everybody while putting in a lot less. We are all so frightened of having a relationship with our co-worker than we don't invest in their wellbeing. It is all about 'ME'!
