Bedside pediatric RNs

[CaitlynRNBSN]

Currently I work in an adult intermediate/CV-ICU type setting at a large hospital. I really hate being at the bedside. It's hard to make non-nurses understand why I hate it, but I just hate hate demanding non appreciative patients. Like I understand you are sick, but there is no reason you need to put on your call light so I can give you a sip of water when the cup is right next to you. Or patient's who want you to wipe their butt when they are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. and TRUST ME, I will do stuff for people who truly cannot do it themselves.

Then we get these frequent fliers with 23948023 different diagnoses and medications. They refuse to listen to anything we tell them and they wonder why they are not getting better. Why is my diabetes out of control?? Well...maybe if you stopped drinking a 12 pack of mountain dew and cut out the carbs we wouldn't be having this issue. OVER AND OVER AND OVER. I'm so sick of it. I'm sick of the crap I put up with, the families who think we are not doing anything correctly yet they have no medical training.

"We want 95year old grandma with an MI to be full code. And she is in pain, but the diluadid you are giving her is making her sleepy. You can't give her anything else though because she is allergic to it."...well, what do you want me to do??? Go to the lab and create a medication the doesn't exist?? Dear god people.

Ok...so now that i'm done with my rant about why I hate my job, let me get to what the point of all this is. I see there is a position open in a general pediatrics floor, with optional training for being on-call in PICU. I've thought about it for a while. I guess i'd like to get some feedback from pediatric RNs to see what their job is like. From an outside pediatrics seems a little better because i'm not dealing with the crap I deal with when I work with adults. I have more compassion for children and I like working with Children. I have a fear of working with the parents because i'm sure they can be nightmares to work with. I am a nightmare when I have my 7 month old go into the Clinic. But I just want to know is pediatrics as good as it sounds??? Feedback would be wonderful, I don't want to get into something i'm going to regret.

[classicdame, MSN, EdD]

I left pedi because of the demanding parents and grandparents. I have a feeling it is like this in every department where your patients are awake. Consider OR??

[KelRN215, BSN, RN]

There is crap in pediatrics too. Actually, a lot of the same crap you are talking about. Where there are children there are also parents... there are kids who get readmitted over and over and over again because their parents don't follow the plan of care just as you talk about the adults with repeated admissions due to non-compliance. The difference is that when it happens with kids, then you're calling Child Protective Services and are involved in a whole big mess. There are occasionally parents of dying or brain dead children who won't sign the DNR and want "everything" done. There are parents whose children have treatable diseases who don't want to treat them because of some misguided belief or something they read on the internet. Then there are court cases because of this. And, of course, there are the parents of the children who you're not really sure why they're even in the hospital who are screaming and insisting that their kid is the "sickest kid on the floor" while you're busy with the actual sickest kid on the floor, who is dying.