ICU nurses attitude toward med-surg nurses

[smallboat]

In the facility where I work, ICU nurses have this ability to make non-ICU trained nurses feel small whenever we transfer a patient to their unit. I was transferring a patient one day, and the ICU charge nurse brushed me off as I was giving report. I cannot understand why ICU nurses need to have the "i know it all and im the best nurse' attitude. Is there a need for them to feel they are smarter than the rest of us? I just dont get it. nursing is not about competition. but ICU nurses make other nurses feel that way. and its sad! what can we, med-surg nurses, do to help change this culture? I wish ICU nurses take to heart the poem "Desiderata".

[Virgo_RN, BSN, RN]

I've worked in ICU and med-surg and seen the good and bad of both worlds. I guess the problem is lack of understanding of what other nursing areas involve. Every speciality area has different set of priorities.

That's exactly it. As a telemetry floor nurse, I used to wonder why I got such cruddy reports from the ED, or why they couldn't seem to place an IV anywhere other than the AC, or why my patients got sent up with wet undergarments or clothes still on. Now that I'm in the ED, I totally get it. Of course, knowing the kind of report the floor nurse wants will make me better at giving report, but I still cannot go into the depth that would normally happen during shift change report on the floor. If the patient has a nice vein somewhere other than the AC, I'll go for it. But if I don't have time to dink around, the AC it is. In fact, I started my first AC IV for the first time ever just the other night. I usually go for the cephalic in the forearm, but most of the time I need to get those labs drawn yesterday, and the AC is going to be the quickest and easiest. If they came in saturated with urine, I've changed them, but in the meantime, they may have wet again and I won't have necessarily had time to address it. It's not that I don't care or that I'm sloppy, it's just that my priorities are really the ABCs, and most everything else can wait.

Having never worked in ICU nor Med/Surg, I can only say it must be a similar kind of dynamic. I remember getting report from ICU nurses, and getting the patient's entire life story, from whether they were breast or bottle fed and at what age they first ate solid food, to what kind of toilet paper they use...yes, I am exaggerating, but that is often how I felt. All I really needed to know, as a floor nurse, was much less detailed.