4 corners

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Specializes in Surgical, quality,management.

Hi guys, the ABC 4 corners doco about bullying in surgeons is on now. I'll have to watch it later on line as my reception is shocking. Any comments on it?

Just finished watching it. I wasn't really surprised by much of it. Will be interesting to see what the Royal College of Surgeons do in response, try and bury it or deal with it? Particularly ironic coming after the Australian Story before it.

Specializes in Surgical, quality,management.

I couldn't watch it as my reception was so intermittent, I did see the Australian Story before it which was interesting. I have experienced neurosurgeons when I was in a senior role and it was very interesting how they assumed that as a nurse I would kow-tow to them - ha! wrong person! Also it is very interesting how the neurosurgery ward works compared to the general and specialist surgical wards, they have so much power and the nurses have none, whereas when I was running my general surgical ward I was in-charge as the NUM and was a collaborative partner.

Have only done neurosurg as a new grad, I didn't notice any especial bullying but then I was just trying to keep my head down. We had one reg who thought she was special, she got talked to by her consultant, so possibly there was some there, though it was kind of hard to tell. Would say neurosurg is not the only area it's a problem, it's just the first that someone stood up. In fact that seemed to be the message.

At my hospital the orthopods are probably worse than the neurosurgeons. We have one or two neurosurgeons who will very occasionally yell and swear, usually when something goes really wrong with one of their patients (can't take any hint of criticism I guess). But most of them are friendly, joke with us, even buy us ward Christmas presents or come to our nurse's ball and mingle. My biggest beef with some of our surgeons is when they don't answer their phones (or get back to us for hours after leaving a message), but that's another story!

You know what they say What's the difference between God and a surgeon? God doesn't think he's a surgeon.

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