What is your biggest nursing pet peeve?

Nurses General Nursing

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Nurses that are brilliant but do not know the difference between contraindication and contradiction! :rotfl:

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Specializes in Community, OB, Nursery.

One thing that really gets under my skin - and fortunately, I don't see it much where I am - is if you didn't get something done, tell me you didn't get it done. Don't let me find out about it halfway through my shift, which, by the way, is 0100. If someone tells me, "You know, Elvish, I'm really sorry I missed [insert whatever here], we just had a crap day." I really don't care. That's why we work 24/7. But don't leave it out - or worse, tell me it's done - only to have me find out 6 hours later when I finally get to sit down that it's not. Grrr.

Specializes in Women's health & post-partum.
My pet peeve is when a doctor gets mad at you becuase you don't know who he/she is. I have had that happen to me in the past. I don't assume just because some one is in a white coat they are a doctor.

I had that happen to me once. He was a resident, showed up in the middle of the night after being on a 3-(or maybe it was 6-) month rotation at a different hospital, wearing a full black beard. The last time I'd seen him he was clean-shaven. He was furious that I didn't immediately know who he was!

Nurses that dress like slobs! I can't stand to see nurses come in those stirrup stretch pants or dingy uniforms or no uniform. While I was in the hospital in ICU, very sedated, I had a male nurse come into the room and I thought he was ZZ Topp or an axe murderer! Sheesh! And he was a mean nurse too!

And along the same lines, while my husband was in the hospital the old black haired nurse reminded him of a witch. He was very uncomfortable around her. He said she would "slink" around the room at night. Guess what she came to work as on Halloween? You guessed it! A witch!

Nurses shouldn't scare the hell out of people like that!

Melinda

Oh my gosh!! This was sooo funny!!!!

Specializes in Rehab.

1. Dayshift nurses strolling in right around 7am or later then taking their lunchbox to the breakroom, heating up their breakfast and finding coffee before printing out their papers to get report ans saying take it slow b/c they are still "waking up." Or better yet they are chronically late b/c their kid didn't want to get up to go to school or missed the bus or whatever. Hey, check it out, I have kids to that need to get to school on time and I'd like to go home too!

2. Other healthcare professionals and even the hospital/facility thinking that nurses are the lowest on the totem poll. I work in an acute rehab facility and I HATE IT when PT/OT comes around in the morning when all our tech's are busy passing out ice/water, taking vitals, giving out breakfast trays, changing pt's and we are trying to give report and they hand us a sheet of the 10 pt's on our floor they want dressed and ready by 9am for PT?!!!! What?!! Also, after 7pm nightshift is by themselves, we have no admin/unit clerk around for late admissions, we have no RT so we do our own resp. therapy, there is no on call pharm, so when PT comes around on the mornings and thinks we need to do that too....GRRRRRRRRRRR.....

3. Same "higher than thou" PT's not understanding what isolation precautions are and taking pt's with MRSA and C-diff out of their rooms with only a gown on *gross* then wondering why we have an outbreak of c-diff all of a sudden???

4. Charge Nurse (male) who just was recently divorced and goes on dating websites all night long then around 5am says "oh gosh I'm gonna be here late I still need to chart!" Same guy who thinks he speaks spanish and calls me

"comadre" all night long.

5. Pass the buck nurses who think nightshift has nothing to do so its ok to give 1700 scheduled meds on our shift or any other slew of things they forgot to do. The legitimate ones I have no problem with but it's the ones that ALWAYS just "dont have the time" to do it that annoys me.

6. Shotty reports. They can tell me everything the pt. said to them or the family or how needy the pt. is but they can't tell me the lbm, what their wound looks like, or when the last pain med was given. C'mon...might as well just not even get report. Did you even do an assessment???

Specializes in ER.

P.S. On your 80th birthday are you changing your code status?

I'm a DNR right now. That's the thing, people that aren't in the health professions don't know what they are getting into, and have a higher than realistic expectation of the results of a code.

Specializes in Hospice.
My mom is full code, and has stage 4 endometrial cancer. She was given 6-12 months to live 15 months ago. She now appears to be on "deaths doorstep" and still chooses to be a full code. Should we tell her that she shouldn't be because it annoys you? She shouldn't want an extra few weeks with her grandchildren before she passes on? She shouldn't want to see her son's birthday wich is just a few weeks away, maybe see her youngest grandchild crawl for the first time? Just tell her, "You're going to die anyways, why not get it over with". Code status is a persons choice and NO ONE should feel like they "have" to go before their ready.

P.S. On your 80th birthday are you changing your code status?

No disrespect intended to you or your mom, but the reality is that if she codes and even survives it, she will still be unlikely to see or participate in much of anything. Resuscitation is almost never successful in elderly, chronically ill people ... those few extra weeks would most likely be spent in an icu on life support with major sedation to allow her to (barely) tolerate the machinery and care.

That said, you are right ... no code status decision should be forced. However, the decision should be made based on a realistic picture of the likely consequences.

I'm 59 and I already have changed my code status.

I can't speak for other posters but for myself, the reason some full code situations bug me is that I am usually, as a hospice nurse, elbow deep in dealing with the consequences ... not an annoyance but a heartbreak as I try to control the pain of battered and broken bodies pushed way beyond what they were ever intended to bear.

Ok, so I know I contributed something to this post way back when it was first started, but I have another one.

We have a digital scale that measures in pounds and ounces. So, if someone weighs 180 lbs, 12oz, it will say exactly that. Many nurses still write it down as 180.12 pounds. That is not right! Written like that it means just over 180, because .12 of a pound is NOT 12oz. , when in actuality the person is really close to 181. Most of the time it doesn't matter much, but when you are monitoring someone for edema, and you have different nurses charting weights the right and wrong way, it can look like bigger changes than it really was.

I could get into more explanation, but that just frustrates me even more .

Thanks for letting me vent :)

Specializes in Med-Surg, Rehab,Acute LTC ,PCU.

1. Docs who don't return urgent phone calls about their patients. 2. Lazy CNAs that won't do jack squat! 3. The family members that take notes or threaten to sue. Or say, "my son is a lawyer, I'm a doctor"....blah, blah to try to scare or intimidate you when you are busting your @ss 4. Obese family members that eat the patient's food from them 5. Visitors that bring a bunch of small kids to the floor and they are out of control. 6. Visitors that bring small infants to the floor when patients are full of infections such as Cdiff..then when you caution them for the baby's safety,they get mad about it. 7. (In Texas) visitors with no shoes or shirt on. 8.(In Texas) Patients who dip snuff 9. Doc's who call you to the desk to ask a dumb question like what were the patient allergy and the chart is right in front of them, on top of that the stupid charge nurse is sitting right there beside the doc yacking on the phone not assisting. 10. Doc's and family members WHO HAVE THE NERVE to come into the breakroom to find you for some stupid crap while you are trying to eat!!:angryfire

Specializes in Medical.
No disrespect intended to you or your mom, but the reality is that if she codes and even survives it, she will still be unlikely to see or participate in much of anything. Resuscitation is almost never successful in elderly, chronically ill people ... those few extra weeks would most likely be spent in an icu on life support with major sedation to allow her to (barely) tolerate the machinery and care.

That said, you are right ... no code status decision should be forced. However, the decision should be made based on a realistic picture of the likely consequences.

I'm 59 and I already have changed my code status.

I can't speak for other posters but for myself, the reason some full code situations bug me is that I am usually, as a hospice nurse, elbow deep in dealing with the consequences ... not an annoyance but a heartbreak as I try to control the pain of battered and broken bodies pushed way beyond what they were ever intended to bear.

There's a very clear distinction, at least where I work, between different kinds of interventions - "not for CPR" doesn't mean "not for any life-extending intervention." Many of our complex, seriously ill and elderly patients are for a range on interventions, including MET calls and ICU admission, but not for CPR.

I feel remarkably cruel doing CPR on someone who has little or no chance of surviving the attempt, particularly as I know the stats: more than 50% of in hospital CPR attempts fail, 50% of survivors re-arrest within 24 hours and 50% of those patients die despite resuscitation attempts... In frail, elderly (over 65) patients survival rates are considerably lower, while the risk of complications (including rib fractures and anoxia) are markedly higher.

I've certainly helped resuscitate patients who survived the attempt and were discharged - a young soldier with malaria, a man in his 60's with accidental CO poisoning, a woman in her 30s who stopped breathing during a seizure.

I've also been involved in unsuccessful attempts that broke my heart - a vasculopathic woman in her 30's following a stroke and MI in the same admission, a dialysis patient in his sixties, a 38 year old woman with Guillian Barre.

But the cases that stick with me in the middle of the night are the patients who could have been allowed to die annd weren't - like the 82 year old woman with dementia whose consultant didn;t believe in NFR orders so we had to resuscitate her at 2AM, getting her back only to have ICU refuse her so we had to let he re-arrest. I felt like she was trying to peacefully ascend and we were pulling her back by her ankles, snapping bones on the way.

I'm 39 and healthy. Everyone in my life, from family to work colleagues to my students know that if I have an unwitnessed arrest with an unknown down time I'm not to be resuscitated. If I have a witnessed arrest from a reversible cause and CPR is unsuccessful within 10 minutes, resuscitation is not to be continued.

CPR is brutal and costly - it's worth the price if you survive intact, but there really are worse outcomes than death. I've seen some of them and that was enough to know it's not something I want for anyone I care about.

I'm 39 and healthy. Everyone in my life, from family to work colleagues to my students know that if I have an unwitnessed arrest with an unknown down time I'm not to be resuscitated. If I have a witnessed arrest from a reversible cause and CPR is unsuccessful within 10 minutes, resuscitation is not to be continued.

CPR is brutal and costly - it's worth the price if you survive intact, but there really are worse outcomes than death. I've seen some of them and that was enough to know it's not something I want for anyone I care about.

I couldn't agree more.

Specializes in ICU/Critical Care.

I think the problem with the society in the U.S., maybe other countries, is that we as a whole are afraid to die. Death is made into such a bad and scary thing when, in certain circumstances, it shouldn't be. Last weekend, I coded an 80yo patient. It was inevitable from his admission and all that was medically wrong with him, that he wasn't going to leave the ICU alive. Why not let people who are trying to die, die with dignity?

I'm 26 yo. I've made it perfectly clear to my parents that if it comes to the point where my quality of life would consist of living in a nursing home with a trach and peg and bedridden, I would rather die because that's not quality of life.

Specializes in Med Surg, Ortho.

Nurses that are late! OOH....can't stand it, not even 5 minutes. So rude and thoughtless, don't they know we want out of there! duhhhh, please be on time, please

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