"...you haven't even been a nurse long enough to even have an opinion."
"...she has nothing to contribute to the nursing profession until she acquires some more experience."
"The nurse was created to assist the physicians with her or her duties, like wiping butts, emptying urinals, giving baths, giving pills."
"...Diploma nurses are the only true nurses. The rest just don't stack up."
"...you are glorified butt wipers, that's what you are...."
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These statements are just a sampling of what I collected from the short week I have been visiting this site. Reposting these statements is not meant to bring up old issues or further attack the individuals who said them. What it is meant to do is alarm you. These statements were said BY nurses TO nurses. As you can guess, these statements are hurtful, both to the person it was directed at, and the nursing profession itself.
Could this be why nursing school enrollment is down?
I am convinced that the nursing shortage has more to do with the lack of new nurses than with old ones leaving the bedside. Every profession has some amount of atrition, but when the average age of a staff nurse is in his/her mid 40's, it makes you wonder.
These kind of statements and attitudes cannot go on. While we may disagree on if a Bachelor's degree should be the point of entry or if NP's should really be allowed to practice without so many years as a staff nurse, we can't continue to foster this type of resentment towards our own. We have to encourage younger nurses and make the profession attractive to others.
We are not the only profession that has problems. Most people enter the nursing field and know full well that they will have to deal with crappy conditions, like a sudden influx of patients, or bodily fluids, mean and nasty patients, death and dying, emergencies. But those aspects of nursing are a GIVEN. What is NOT to be expected is the kind of attitude that is displayed above. It is this attitude that drives people to either leave the profession completely, or never begin it. I'd like to focus on those who never begin it. Those potential nurses that we lose because we constantly berate new nurses and make them feel inferior. Those nurses we lose because RNs are viewed as unskilled paper pushers and order givers. Those nurses we lose because we consider BSN prepared nurses "glorified butt wipers." Tell me what person would want to persue this career if this is what we think of it ourselves?
Most high school students want to go to college, but how many really want to go to college to be a "glorified butt wiper?" I know I didn't.
If we want to solve a piece of the nursing shortage, I think making our profession attractive to young people, standardizing nursing requirements, and showing a little bit of dignity for our own profession may be a start. Then, once we have ample staff in the hospitals, schools and community again, we can start to work on things like pay....
