sooo tired of staff without ANY compassion or empathy!!!

Nurses Relations

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Ugh, I need to vent!!! I've been a nurse for several years and I get tired and

stressed out like everyone else. No, I'm not always thinking the nicest things,

but I am ALWAYS kind to patients, no matter what! I always keep in mind that it's not about ME, and that they don't NEED/ WANT/ or CARE to know about how busy or

totally stressed I am. They are there to get GOOD CARE, and they deserve it!

I'm actually venting about a specific situation that I see time and time again, anywhere I've worked. The patients that are dying and/or are in pain---especially the lonely ones with no visitors.

We've been taking care of someone like that, and it is SO sad because every procedure we do hurts her (surgical wound is red and draining, and as with many patients, removing the TAPE from the dressing is very painful!) colostomy care, turning, stage II decubitis), so we are extra gentle (I hope EVERYONE is!). Once we are done with all our TASKS, she begs us to stay with her. Sadly, we have SO little time, but I try to stay and give a few encouraging words, feed her some ice chips, etc.

What I am VENTING about is most of the nurses and aides complaining CONSTANTLY about how "ugh, she's ALWAYS wanting pain meds!" (yea, she's DYING of mulitple CANCERS!), "ugh, she's on her light ALL THE TIME!" (yeaa, she's in pain, she's afraid, she's lonely---have ya noticed NO ONE visits her!?)......One nurse even said "I TOLD her "I do NOT HAVE TIME TO STAY IN HERE, I AM BUSY!!!" (seriously????)

Like I said, I'm busy too, and I am by no means the perfect nurse, and yes, the sound of her CONSTANT call light annoys me too (sometimes). Yesterday, I barely sat down the whole shift, (not complaining, just stating a fact!), and was extreeeemely busy, too. And even though I didn't have extra time for this patient--- at the very LEAST---I wished I had, and still remembered the REASONS she was on her call light every five minutes and TRIED to take the best care of her I could. People forget the interventions we've all heard about to try when someone is constantly calling! Does everyone forget them?

On the other hand, where I worked before, I was working with a very similar patient. The HUGE difference was, it was a SLOW shift and I DID have lots of extra time to give TLC. Every time this sweet man called on his light (about every 10 minutes), some of my co-workers would roll their eyes, say things like "ugh, just IGNORE him this time".....REALLY???? THEY weren't busy either, they were having too much fun perusing the web with their phones. UGH, are your coworkers like this???? I am SOOO tired of this! :no:

I always want to ask these people "and what if that was YOUR loved one? Nurses sitting around playing on their phones and saying "just ignore him/her" while your loved one is wet/ soiled/ sad/ in pain/ needing to be turned/ lonely.....????:no:

I am not a nurse but I do work in a clinic (lab) and we have a room for EKG's, meaning people are, at most, half-dressed in there. I have a coworker who is always hot and demands the temp in that room be turned down (around 65F). I turn up the heat but my coworker always turns it way down. EKG's do not take more than a minute and the pts are freezing in there, I think she can handle it for a minute. She's young, and rather self-centered. I want to say it's not all about you but she doesn't care. Part of working with people who didn't have to earn their posotion I suppose.

I am not a nurse but I do work in a clinic (lab) and we have a room for EKG's, meaning people are, at most, half-dressed in there. I have a coworker who is always hot and demands the temp in that room be turned down (around 65F). I turn up the heat but my coworker always turns it way down. EKG's do not take more than a minute and the pts are freezing in there, I think she can handle it for a minute. She's young, and rather self-centered. I want to say it's not all about you but she doesn't care. Part of working with people who didn't have to earn their posotion I suppose.

I work with fellow NA's and nurses who will open the window in a room mid winter because they don't want to smell the BM. (the patient at this point is uncovered and naked). REALLY gets on my nerves, and I will shut it again right away. I don't care if I have to smell an unpleasant smell for a few moments, it is unfair for a patient to be left shivering and naked for the comfort of a worker.

I could go on for so long with other examples.

this is going a little off topic, but one of the things that struck me is the nurses on their cell phones or messing around on the internet. SERIOUSLY?? I work on a med/surg floor, and there is absolutely no time for that. I am constantly in my patient's rooms, or right outside of them charting. I literally just walk back and forth between my rooms for the entire 12 hrs, checking in on my patients, and providing the necessary care/treatments/meds, etc. If you have time to be on your phone messing around, then you should be in a patients room, doing the little "extra" things, like providing them with education, or just having a regular conversation with them to make them feel like you care about them as a person and are interested in them, checking to see if they need something like a warm blanket, etc...or you could be researching things you feel like you need to brush up on in order to provide better/more knowledgable care. You are at WORK, this is not your time for social media. Patients are on the call light a whole lot less when you are in their rooms often and they have the confidence that you will be back "soon."

OP, I feel the exact same way as you. Unfortunately I cannot control what others nurse do and how they respond to patients. I just continue to be the change I want to see. This is so nerve wrecking, though.

I'm not a nurse (yet), but this is one of the challenges I expect to come across. There are some who treat nursing as just a job, and patients are just a bed number. For those who have a little more empathy, just be the best nurse YOU can be. You can't be a superhero, but you can show a little more care. And hopefully some of your caring will rub off on your colleagues.

*shrug* Eh, well dunno what to say about that. I'm in the military and most of the providers are cold, mean and generally act like they hate their job and the patients. Unless your guts are hanging out there is so sympathy. If you're in pain you're getting motrin and water.

Clearly, you have never been my patient.

In all honesty, I understand what you mean, though. I've seen that stuff go down. I am genuinely sorry this has been your experience.

Specializes in ER, Tele/PCU.

nervousnurse,

I completely agree with you. Sometimes I have to stop and say to myself "did my coworker really just say that?!" I recently had a patient code & pass away in the ER, and the wife was in so much shock she kept saying he was going to wake up and go home with her, it was so heartbreaking. The next day I was explaining the story to one of my coworkers, telling her I felt so bad for this woman, and all my coworker could say was "your too nice to sit there and keep explaining what happened, you just need to say he's dead and he's not coming back and you need to deal with it!" :no:

I've been a nurse going on 4 years now, and I've come to understand that not everyone is there for the same reasons. Some nurses are there strictly just to make good money. Some are there because they fell in love with nursing and helping others. You want your coworkers to be there for the right reasons- to take care of others before themselves, to save lives man!, to bring a smile to someone's face. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. I'm with you- I wish the nurses who are self-centered and unsympathetic could just take a step back and see the big picture.

But, on the other side, there are some really kick ass nurses who are just burnt out from ungrateful and demanding patients. The food is too cold, or too hot. Or there isn't butter or salt. The pillows are too stiff,or too fluffy. The blankets are too thin, or too heavy. The list goes on and on. I don't mind doing anything for a patient, but the basic "please & thank you" really go a long way for me. I think sometimes we get sick of hearing everything we do wrong or everything that sucks, I think if we get some more apppreciation from time to time I think you'd see some of those nasty nurses having an attitude change.

In the end, be the kind of nurse you'd want to work with. Keep doing what you're doing, all that matters is our patients :D

Specializes in Pedi.
I work with fellow NA's and nurses who will open the window in a room mid winter because they don't want to smell the BM. (the patient at this point is uncovered and naked). REALLY gets on my nerves, and I will shut it again right away. I don't care if I have to smell an unpleasant smell for a few moments, it is unfair for a patient to be left shivering and naked for the comfort of a worker.

I could go on for so long with other examples.

The windows in your hospital open? Hmm... I always thought hospitals had windows that didn't open for safety reasons, guess it's just my area.

Anyway, to address the OP's point- some people don't have any perspective. When I worked in the hospital, I was one of the few nurses who would take care of the patients that no one else wanted to touch. Some patients/parents were legitimately unreasonable (screaming that their kid with a migraine is the sickest kid on the floor when you're busy taking care of 3 children with cancer) but most of the time, if you stepped back and thought about it, you could understand where these people are coming from.

I also think we are all a little jaded. I really do forget sometimes that children having cancer is an anomaly and that even a "good" pediatric cancer diagnosis (those who live in the pediatric oncology world seem to view ALL as one of the "good" cancers because it can be cured the majority of the time) is completely devastating to all involved. In the case of ALL, even though the child will likely survive, they will still be on chemotherapy for 2-2 1/2 years and their lives will be completely changed. I realized how desensitized we often become to these kinds of things when I took a referral for a new patient last week... the patient is a school aged child with newly diagnosed stage IV neuroblastoma- a horrible cancer no matter what but in older children the prognosis is even worse. When the Case Manager called me to make the referral she made a comment about how the mom will need "extra support" because "she just keeps crying." I was like, um, HELLO... of course she's crying, she just found out her child has a fatal disease. And then when you actually read into this child's story- the mother kept bringing him saying something was wrong and was sent home multiple times before a scan was done that revealed metastatic cancer. So when you're told that your child is just constipated and then you find out that he actually is probably going to die, yeah, I'd say you'll cry.

I have to admit, this is a big concern of mine as well. I am still in nursing school, but I have already seen how much time nurses truly have to spend with their patients. I love caring for people, but sometimes I can see that it is an impossible task. How can I tell a patient I have xyz other patients to see, and leave the room? I have seen some nurses do this, and it is sad. But I know where they are coming from. It is too bad we have an insurance focused care system, instead of a patient focused one.

My husband was a patient in a large university hospital's MICU waiting for a liver. For the most part, the nurses were merely OK or totally apathetic Very, very few nurses paid attention to the alarms or whether their patient was off the monitor. Spent even less interacting with them. I came in one night and found my husband sitting at the edge of the bed exhausted and short of breath. He told me the nurse had unhooked him and taken him to the bathroom and he had to make it back to bed on his own. He had been up at the bedside almost an hour before I got there, I put him back to bed and reattached his monitor. (I got quite proficient with their monitoring equipment) His nurse is lucky he didn't fall. Apparently, she didn't remind him to pull the call light (mental status was a little shaky at times) and she never came back to check on him. The alarm had gone off the whole time. What was she doing? At the nurses station with 3 of her cohorts sharing things on their cell phones. I stood at the door looking out toward the group and finally after 15 minutes someone acknowledged me. I asked who his nurse was and she came over and got an attitude with me after I explained what had just happened. Whatever. Before anyone says anything about MICU nursing....don't go there...I am a ICU nurse myself so I know how it goes sometimes when things are crazy. Things were quiet that night.

Great, another "let's rant about every bad nurse we've ever met" thread where we all get to feel superior because we're so much more caring.

We have a problem with cell phone usage at my facility. They won't ban them, because they say a child might need to call, or some other emergency. Staff is on their phones constantly. It is unprofessional, and rude. There is no excuse for anyone having to wait one hour for a dilaudid refill. I would be knocking some heads over that.

How exactly does a nurse being on their cell phone make the pharmacy deliver the dilaudid any slower? Because everywhere that I've worked, it wasn't nursing that was the delay in a PCA refill, it was pharmacy. Of course the nurses always make a perfect target for any frustration with the delay.

He had been up at the bedside almost an hour before I got there ... (mental status was a little shaky at times) ... I stood at the door looking out toward the group and finally after 15 minutes someone acknowledged me. ....

Exactly 15 minutes? Not 14? Or 16? Although I'm sure your perception of time was better than the man with "shaky" mental status, who couldn't remember to call for assistance but knew the exact amount of time he'd been sitting on the side of the bed. I'm sure in your time as an ICU nurse you've NEVER had someone perceive their wait for you to be longer than it actually was.

No feeling superior here; but wooh, honestly, I have seen a lot less compassion among nurses in the last 10 years or so----at least it seems that way. Nothing scientific or verifiable to the point of being generalizable to the greater nursing population at large. You just have to wonder sometimes is all. It's sad, and, well, depressing. I've also witnessed it as loved ones were patients in hospitals. I don't know what's happening with human empathy in this field, but seriously, it troubles me.

This can be a hard situation to take in. Did you try talking about this to your supervisor on how this issue can be addressed?

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