Abuse In Nursing School

[europapearl]

I'm a second-year student in a small community college's ADN program. I'm nearly 5 weeks into my third semester, and I've discovered that my program is something of a cesspit. I've witnessed an instructor yelling at a student for using "lay terms" on the floor when asking a nurse a question about a 6-second cardiac strip (which we hadn't learned about yet) using the only terminology we had learned as of yet. I've read emails in which multiple nursing instructors told a student she's "at the bottom of the barrel" and "will fail out" of the program. I've also seen an instructor hold a finger up to a student and irritatedly tell him "I'm done with you" when he asked her if she would answer a question about his clinical paperwork. I've heard from students from this very student's clinical group that the same instructor continually told him his interventions are completely wrong; one student even recalled telling him, "Thanks for taking one for the team". This student has since left for another program after the director of the nursing program told him "the program is too small for me to do [anything]". Both of the students are incredibly smart, and they both work very hard.

I have not been abused in this way. However, it is incredibly distressing as a student taught the importance of professionalism, empathy, and bioethics to see her classmates' cut down in such a cruel way. So I ask you all - as fellow student nurses, recent graduates, currently-working nurses, and retired nurses - if this is simply the way of nursing school and the nursing field beyond? What are your experiences? Is there a point to so fully destroying a student's confidence and choosing who you will and will not pass? Is this what everyone meant when they warned us "Nurses eat their young?" And why, as a profession devoted to nurturing, educating, and helping our fellow man, do we treat each other so poorly?

Signed,

A Distressed and Concerned Nursing Student