Collaboration....

amoLucia · Sep 9, 2012

Smiling here too! :yelclap:

Mrsearly2009 · Sep 9, 2012

This what nursing is all about! :yeah:

aboucherrn · Sep 9, 2012

:redbeathe Love it!!! :redbeathe

bearcat194 · Sep 9, 2012

??? Newbie here, can someone please explain???

merlee · Sep 9, 2012

bearcat194 - - Nurse drew blood from PICC line so the lab tech didn't need to stick pt #1. Later, lab tech saw the blood culture bottles for a different patient, and drew those labs so the nurse didn't have to. Collaboration - each helps the other.

MsPiggy · Sep 9, 2012

Makes life so much easier when we work together! Love this story :0) I'm really lucky to

be in a situation where everyone works well together & helps each other out.

Heck, when I take a day off my boss & the case management assistants work my caseload for me

so I don't come back to a big old stack data to be entered. I seriously work with a GREAT team.

I hope after I finish my RN I can find a place to work with such good collaberation and kind co-workers.

Sure makes your day much more pleasant, even when it gets nuts.

bearcat194 · Sep 9, 2012

Sweeet, thanks merlee.

Aeterna, BSN, RN · Sep 11, 2012

It's good to hear these kinds of stories! I wish there was more collaboration in my workplace, but I'm seeing small improvements here and there.

When I first started working, morale was very low. It was a "every nurse for her/himself" kind of mentality - no one answered any one else's call bells, only a select few nurses would offer you help if you were swamped, etc.

One of the big things I was trained to do as a nursing student was to think ahead to the next shift and prepare anything the oncoming nurses will need. In my fourth year placement, night shift prepared any IV lines that were going to be needed for day shift, for example. Nothing of the sort was going on in my workplace, and everyone just complained all the time.

But I stuck to my training and did my best to prepare everything for the oncoming shift, particulary if I was working nights (because there's usually a couple of hours in the dead of night where there's not a whole lot to do). I've had to prepare up to 8 different IV lines on a night shift for the next shift once, but I did it and hung them in the rooms they were needed in. All the nurses would watch me and ask me what I was doing. I told them, "Getting these ready for day shift!" I'm pretty sure I was the only one doing it back then so they probably thought I was crazy.

Now, though? I've noticed that a few other nurses have caught on to this practice, too. One of the more junior nurses told me, "I followed you in the shift after yours and I loved it. Everything was perfect. Everything was prepared for me. So now, I try to do the same when I work." I love thinking that perhaps I'm making little changes here and there to make things work more smoothly!