Experiences with rude staff at clinical sites

Nursing Students General Students

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I am having such a hard time with dealing with some of the attitudes of some of the RN's on staff at some clinical sites. I do not understand how nurses who have been through the same thing we have been through, can be just so unbelievably rude to students on the floor. I keep saying to myself "They used to be students too!"

Today for example, our instructor went over a head to toe assessment on a newborn. There was this awful RN that came into the room a few minutes after our instructor left. She started complaining about how the students the instructor "pulled at the baby for 20 minutes and couldn't even give the vitals they recorded?" Another student and I were standing right behind her.

We have had a few run in's with this nurse throughout our L&D class. She has ALWAYS been just so rude. I had the newborn's vitals written down waiting for her to come in so I could tell her. After that comment, there was no way I was going to help her do her job.

It is like a fight between the staff and the students these days. They don't want us there yet, we are the ones that save them so much time by doing the rounds to take care of vitals, med administration, and comfort measures.

Some of the RN staff nurses we have ran into will just flat out ignore us if we ask them a question. Some have gone so far as to intentionally knock into us walking down the hallway. We have even seen a few incidences where the staff RN's will be sitting behind the nurses station in groups talking about the students and even so far as to the way their hair looks or if they are fat.

HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE NURSES?!?!

I am not understanding how people like this still have a job. We are taught to accept people and you have to in order to help them. You are SUPPOSED to have compassion and empathy and certainly be considerate of other people. These are all aspects of being a nurse. I have been making mental notes on what kind of nurse I will never be thanks to them.

How do you deal with this kind of behavior? Our class and everyone in it has been nothing short of considerate, polite, and professional. Even when they act like this.

But how do you go about handling something like this without jeopardizing your own future? We have spoken up once and we ended up losing the clinical site for our school by doing so because the chief nurse was just as bad as the rest of them. So now, we just do not say anything.

Do not get me wrong, we run across some amazing nurses that are really helpful and we learn so much from them but the bad ones seem to outweigh the good ones. I just do not understand how someone like these nurses could manage to still have a job by acting this way. Is this what I have to look forward to when I graduate? At the very least, I can guarantee that when I do graduate, I will never treat onsite students this way.

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.

Just like in life, some people suck. They will in school, they will in your job. Be professional. Take the high road.

Your comment about not helping them do their job make me worry that you could end up being failed, as it's your job as well as hers/his. Just be careful. Be helpful. Stay under the radar.

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Specializes in PICU, Sedation/Radiology, PACU.

I'm sorry that you're having such a bad experience with the nurses on the unit. If your statements are true (especially regarding the staff making comments about the personal appearance of the students and knocking into them in the hallway) I certainly hope that your clinical instructor is aware and that she addresses it with the manager on the floor. That behavior is not acceptable of any professional adult.

I will say that it appears to be more of a unit-specific problem than one that applies to all nurses, so be careful generalizing. While most floors will have one or two nurses that just don't like teaching students, it's very, very rare to find a floor where every nurse seems to have such a malicious attitude.

I do have to address just one statement in your post, though:

They don't want us there yet, we are the ones that save them so much time by doing the rounds to take care of vitals, med administration, and comfort measures.

Nursing students very rarely save the floor nurses any time or work. When I am working with a student, it easily takes me the same amount of time, or longer, to complete tasks. The nurse has to ensure that medications have been given, still perform her own vitals/assessments to make sure they are accurate, do the documentation, follow up with the patient, and oversee the student's actions. Many times students have the idea that they are "doing the work for the nurses" but that's really not the case. I love working with students, but they do add work to the day, not save me from doing it.

Moving on...

How should you handle it? Exactly as you are currently handling it. Be as polite as possible. Learn what you can from whom you can. If you have specific problems with the staff, bring it to the attention of your clinical instructor and let her decide if/how to best address it. Align yourself with the helpful nurses- go to those nurses or to your instructor with your questions. And remember these experiences so that, when you are a nurse, you can be the one that students love working with.

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Ashley, On the current unit we are working on, we have been on the shift with the same 9 nurses. Only 2 of which sound like yourself (and by the way THANK YOU for being one of those amazing nurses), the other 7 however, do not do their vitals or pass their medication or even do rounds to check on their patients when we are there. They sit at the nurses station almost the entire shift aside from MAYBE one visit to their pt's rooms. We do their rounds and we report the information back to them. This is the first unit I have seen that is this bad. My comment about saving them time, applies directly to the current unit we are on. How can they be so rude and see us as so inadequate but yet find us capable enough to run their rounds? Usually, if we have the same amount of nurses on other units, the ratio is opposite and we find about 2 nurses we quickly learn to stay far away from. But this unit is the worst I have ever seen. At other units, it has been easy to just look past the 1-2 maybe 3 nurses that treat us as an inconvenience, but with this unit, we can't get away from it. Giving them the information they want us to get during rounds is nerve racking enough so we never ask questions so we are learning nothing from them. Our instructor for this class responds with things like "maybe they are just having a bad day" or "did you do something wrong to the nurse?" and it doesn't help us.

de2013,

I do stand by my decision to not give her the information. When you are confronted by someone with such a bad attitude who has directly shown strong dislike to the fact that you are even in the same room with them, you aren't going to approach them as it is. There was no way I was going to help her. I know that personality and all it would have done was make her defensive by saying "I do have the vitals." One student "corrected" another nurse on this floor with the same attitude a few weeks ago by telling her that she did in fact pass the meds this nurse was accusing her of not passing which the student had documented half an hour earlier. The staff nurse responded with "if you were anywhere close to a decent nurse you would have told me." She said this to the student in front of the patient. The student told her twice that she had administered the meds prior to the nurse accusing her of not doing it. In turn, she was treated worse for the remainder of the shift, which was another 9 hours. Had the vitals been in anyway abnormal, my decision would have been different. However, considering they were in limits, I was not going to risk getting personally attacked for doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Mean people are found everywhere and I understand that we run across people like that every day. However, being in a professional setting where we are directly caring for the lives of so many patients on any given day, it shouldn't be acceptable. What if the nurse didn't check the documentation and instead, continued to hold this attitude and administer the same meds again to the patient? Not to mention she completely destroyed any rapport the student had with patient by doing what she did in front of the patient. The majority of the nurses on this unit, aside from the 2 that we absolutely love, have all shown similar behavior. I don't understand how this behavior could be so openly accepted on a unit. We as an entire group dread going to clinical now. We spend 12 hours walking on egg shells, trying to overlook the things they say to us or about us when we are right in front of them every clinical here. Some of us even question our ability to even be a nurse because of them. We know we are competent but being talked down to like that all day makes a lot of us question our own abilities. It is just so frustrating. =/

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I have only done one clinical and when my group was there you did feel like you were a burden to them. Everytime I asked the nurse something he would respond in a manner that you were annoying him. He was so bad one of my classmates secretly switched the assignment sheet so I got him and then confessed later in the day. I kept my mouth shut and did what my teacher told us to do. I was very polite and tried to act like how he treated me didnt faze me. I think sometimes they forget they were in our shoes and were just as scared. And yes there were the ones who really wanted to teach you and didnt mind questions. However, my teacher was so afraid of rocking the boat there he told us not to ask a lot of questions.

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That is our instructor now too. She seems just as worried about "rocking the boat". All it takes is the staff to hold a meeting and ultimately say whether or not the instructor or even the group as a whole can come back. This very group of nurses did just that to our last instructor for this class. She explained to a physician that the staff nurse was not the one taking care of the patient that day, that it was the student. The physician asked the staff nurse about the progress of a patient, the nurse didn't know what to say and our instructor chimed in and said to ask the student because the nurse hadn't been in the room once. Sticking up for us cost her the job. She is no longer allowed to be an instructor at that site. Majority rules and if the majority is all one of the same, it is a losing battle for everyone else. We have recently just started to find a corner and just stay there as much as possible now. If we see them coming, we are literally rushing to hide somewhere. We figure out what we need to do, look at the orders, run their shifts, do their documentation and hope they stay sitting at that front desk all day like they have been. I do not mind doing the work, I enjoy it I really do. When they are not around, I feel good about being a nurse and I feel confident and productive. If we have a question, We wait until one of the two amazing nurses come around.

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I do stand by my decision to not give her the information. When you are confronted by someone with such a bad attitude who has directly shown strong dislike to the fact that you are even in the same room with them, you aren’t going to approach them as it is. There was no way I was going to help her. . =/

My opinion about that kind of mindset, especially when I interview new grads, is that you will have trouble finding a place to work. Honestly, no one has to like you, you don't have to like anyone, you just have to work together...end of story. If you don't like someone's attitude and they don't like yours, that has no bearing on whether or not you give them information related to a patient, especially if you're student and they've relied on you to get that information in the first place. Sometimes you have to put the personal feelings aside and look at things from the other's point of view. While this site may be bad, it was mentioned before that students often increase the work of the nurse. I can tell you that when I'm caring for my patient, it goes much faster when I do things myself. It takes a lot more time to figure out what you did, what I need to do still, and whether or not what you did was documented correctly. You see students who are still passing 10am meds at 1130 because they took longer than others, had to wait on the teacher, etc. etc...so when the nurse is told the student will do the 10am meds, but the nurse looks at 1115 and it's still not signed off, or the drawer isn't empty...it leads to more work trying to figure out what's up.

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Specializes in NICU.

I have had this experience too at placements....nurses rolling their eyes and acting like we are in the way. The point is, we are in the way. Nurses have jobs to do, and with us hanging around trying to learn...it takes them longer to do their job. They usually dont ask for students, they're told they're having them. Now, this doesnt excuse mean behaviour. I think that nurses really should value education of other nurses and remember that at one time they were in the same position. But I also try to place myself in their shoes.

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Ashley, On the current unit we are working on, we have been on the shift with the same 9 nurses. Only 2 of which sound like yourself (and by the way THANK YOU for being one of those amazing nurses), the other 7 however, do not do their vitals or pass their medication or even do rounds to check on their patients when we are there. They sit at the nurses station almost the entire shift aside from MAYBE one visit to their pt's rooms. We do their rounds and we report the information back to them. This is the first unit I have seen that is this bad. My comment about saving them time, applies directly to the current unit we are on. How can they be so rude and see us as so inadequate but yet find us capable enough to run their rounds? Usually, if we have the same amount of nurses on other units, the ratio is opposite and we find about 2 nurses we quickly learn to stay far away from. But this unit is the worst I have ever seen. At other units, it has been easy to just look past the 1-2 maybe 3 nurses that treat us as an inconvenience, but with this unit, we can't get away from it. Giving them the information they want us to get during rounds is nerve racking enough so we never ask questions so we are learning nothing from them. Our instructor for this class responds with things like "maybe they are just having a bad day" or "did you do something wrong to the nurse?" and it doesn't help us.

de2013,

I do stand by my decision to not give her the information. When you are confronted by someone with such a bad attitude who has directly shown strong dislike to the fact that you are even in the same room with them, you aren't going to approach them as it is. There was no way I was going to help her. I know that personality and all it would have done was make her defensive by saying "I do have the vitals." One student "corrected" another nurse on this floor with the same attitude a few weeks ago by telling her that she did in fact pass the meds this nurse was accusing her of not passing which the student had documented half an hour earlier. The staff nurse responded with "if you were anywhere close to a decent nurse you would have told me." She said this to the student in front of the patient. The student told her twice that she had administered the meds prior to the nurse accusing her of not doing it. In turn, she was treated worse for the remainder of the shift, which was another 9 hours. Had the vitals been in anyway abnormal, my decision would have been different. However, considering they were in limits, I was not going to risk getting personally attacked for doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Mean people are found everywhere and I understand that we run across people like that every day. However, being in a professional setting where we are directly caring for the lives of so many patients on any given day, it shouldn't be acceptable. What if the nurse didn't check the documentation and instead, continued to hold this attitude and administer the same meds again to the patient? Not to mention she completely destroyed any rapport the student had with patient by doing what she did in front of the patient. The majority of the nurses on this unit, aside from the 2 that we absolutely love, have all shown similar behavior. I don't understand how this behavior could be so openly accepted on a unit. We as an entire group read going to clinical now. We spend 12 hours walking on egg shells, trying to overlook the things they say to us or about us when we are right in front of them every clinical here. Some of us even question our ability to even be a nurse because of them. We know we are competent but being talked down to like that all day makes a lot of us question our own abilities. It is just so frustrating. =/

Really? You stand by the decision not to tell the nurse information about her patient? I don't care how rude she is; how difficult she is to work with or how hard she is to get along with. You are a studen tasked with assisting the staff in their care of the patients. Just because a patient's vitals are "in limits" is immaterial. That patient could have been trending high or low an the "in limits" vitals could actually be a significant change. You are not yet the nurse with the right to decide what information is or is not valuable.

While you may not see these nurses assessing their patients or otherwise following right behind what you are doing, even the mean nurses are most likely concerned about their licenses and will be caring for their patients around you and your fellow students. You need to learn, but you don't speed things up for most nurses. Take the time to learn what you can from the unit. If nothing else, take the lesson in how to work with people you don't like.

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Don't forget the most important thing at stake is the health of the patient, especially if its a baby who can't speak their concerns.

That isn't chastisement, I was bullyed on my first unit so bad that even the hospital asked me to file formal grievances because the person responsible had done it for so long.--but thats another post---So you have my sympathy, but what helped me and still does, whether student or teacher, is to remember who the assignment is really about: the patient. And doing your best by them will always help a bad situation feel like a success.

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.

You stand by your decision to withhold information from the primary nurse regarding a pt she was charged with caring for?

If it were me I would not only fail you I would drop you from the program.

The nurse's attitude may be unprofessional but that does not make you actions acceptable. I don't play games with patient care.

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Honestly, I dont usually like to criticize someone one this forum but what you said was kind of scary. You ALWAYS have to let the nurse that is legally taking care of that patient know everything involved. It doesnt make a difference if they are mean, or scary, or they seem like they dont care. One of the things about being in any sort of workplace is that the first priority is to do the job. Feelings and cliques or whatever come second. Always. This isnt going to be the end of not liking the people you work with and your first priority is to the patient and patient outcome, which is your job, and the last is the way you relate to your co-worker personally.

Yes, they were wrong, and I am sorry that you have to deal with it. Not everyone, even nurses (and sometimes especially nurses) is going to be compassionate and caring to everyone all the time. They have stressful jobs and they may use every ounce of caring up by the time you get to them. Im not saying its right, Im just saying thats the way it is.

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