I had my last week of clinicals (for this semester) this week and I really wanted to get all 15 weeks in before I wrote this out.
We were on a PCU (pulm/cardio unit) at a hospital and were treated horrendously by the RN staff there. On our first day the head nurse said to our professor (with all of us in earshot) "tell your students not to bother ANY of my nurses". Then she proceeded to chase us all over the floor when it came time to discuss our charting notes in private. We went to the nurses break room and got chased out of there, we went to the nurses locker room and got chased out of there. We tried around the nurses station (which is pretty roomy) and we were told we couldn't congregate there either. Then we ended up in the family waiting room (which is about 10 feet from the nurses station) and we were told we can't take the charts in there in case the doctors or other nurses are looking for them (as if they couldn't walk 10 feet and ask if we've got X room's chart . So then we just took the pages we absolutely needed.
Then this head nurse went to our dean of nursing and told her that we didn't do patient care for several weeks until our professor got access into the Pyxis machine which is absolute BS. We did pt care our FIRST day there (well first day after orientation).
One nurse even came up to me and said "how on earth do you people learn anything only being on the floor for 4 hours?". I said "well several of my school's graduates work at this hospital and even on this floor - you tell me how are they doing?" She rolled her eyes at me and walked away. But we've encountered SEVERAL RN's who are just plain nasty to us because we're students. They act like they were never students themselves? The ones who were newer graduates (within the last year or two) were the nicest and of the WHOLE floor there were only 4 or 5 who were truly helpful (the said new grads) and the rest were nasty to us or really unhelpful.
And the thing is that it's not just this floor or this hospital. We've run into these types over 3 different hospitals (so far) and at least 7 different floors.
Does anyone else find this? If so, how do you deal with it?
We did put up an article around the nurses areas about "mentoring your own" and it was a great article about giving students a break and to remember what it was like to be in our shoes, etc." They left them posted for a while, but I saw they were down this week.