I could not believe this student I had the other night. I picked up a shift on my old unit (telemetry) and the charge asked me if I minded having a student with me as his preceptor had called off sick. Ofcourse not! I love having students. So, I grab my MAR's, Kardexes and tell him we are going to check them over for mistakes. This usually takes about 30 minutes. In that time, NO LIE, he got 2 text messages and an actual phone call. All of which he took.
When I was done I said are you ready? (I will admit, this was said through clenched teeth) and he said, Yeah. CHECKED HIS PHONE ONE MORE TIME:angryfire Then I said, Good. Because the FIRST thing your going to do is take that phone out of your pocket, put it in your coat and leave it there for the rest of the shift.
OMG! I mean, I will call my husband during my break, but I can't think of anyone I need to talk to while I am at work. It was SOOOO inappropriate. Has anyone else encountered anything like this?
Specializes in LTC, CPR instructor, First aid instructor..
I had an emergency call at work once. It was before cell phones were invented. Our house was on fire, and my mother and sister had already been taken to the hospital. I was sent home, so anyone can get an emergency call. The nursing instructor would be notified.
My cell phone has a PDA that I have my Davis drug guide and Tabers medical dictionary on. I'll bet several people thought I was texting away when I was really looking up meds.... Oh well...in any case I think you handled it correctly. I'm not one to jump straight into tattle tell mode so I don't know if you have to run to the instructor with it so long as he put it away as asked and the problem doesn't crop up again. It is inappropriate and rude to be fooling around with your phone and holding up the work of the unit.
i cannot say i was nasty but it was clear that i was upset. i was a preceptor fill-in like you, for a bsn nurse and i thought, great, they will be sharp and want to jump right in and do hands on care, right? not. this girl told me that she was not going to college to do the work of a nurses aide! she was not going to empty a foley, or bath a patient, eewww. i could not believe it. that is why i am for all nursing students to spend at least a year as a nurses aide or clinical partner or whatever you call it and get down and do the basics of bedside nursing. she was so taken with the charts, the drug book and the doctors that i had to chase her around all night. god, she graduated and got a job on that very unit! no, that is not why i left, but it would be enough. even while i taught high school, before i became a nurse, i banned those damn cell phones from my class. if you have a family emergency, they should have the number of the unit. now i carry a trauma pager but can you imagine, shutting the pager off or turning off the vibrate mode because i am on the phone wit a "friend?" it even bothers me when i see people in traffic talking on the phones. do you remember when you had to find a quarter and a pay phone to call from the road? and, we survived. sheesh. i do not mean to sound pety but imagine the point of view of the patient when the nurse says ,"oh excuse me mrs.smith, i have to get this,"?
Ya know what nurses did "back in the day" before cell phones?
Anything important had to go through the desk phone. And of course personal calls were frowned upon, so a name and # was taken and the call was taken care of at break unless it was an emergency. We all survived.
Very inappropriate especially for a student as well as rude to continue with call while you were going over things with him.
Even when cell phones came out, I would never think to use one when working!!!
Not phone related but to do with students. We had a final year student nurse actually spit in the sink right next to a pts bed. I was gobsmacked, couldn't believe what she did. :uhoh21:
That's why we need the good old nursing instructors that can flunk you for looking at them wrong that day. A little fear never hurt any student (as long as there is a learning environment). The way I look at it if I'm "just" a bed side nurse, than let the msn teach the students. Not me. Don't get me wrong I love to teach but, I'm tired of the colleges passing their students off on us and then bashing us on "how little we know". The students need a continuity of teaching. They need a group of instructors that uphold professional standards .The student needs to show up , clean pressed uniform, white shoes, good data base for pt care for that day and ready to think on their feet. If there was an emergency, then he should have said so. I doubt that there was. He just had no real threat to his well being, so he felt free to take advantage. There would have been no way in he ....double tooth picks I would have done that infront on a nursing instructor.
Specializes in LTC, CPR instructor, First aid instructor..
well,
i cannot say i was nasty but it was clear that i was upset. i was a preceptor fill-in like you, for a bsn nurse and i thought, great, they will be sharp and want to jump right in and do hands on care, right? not. this girl told me that she was not going to college to do the work of a nurses aide! she was not going to empty a foley, or bath a patient, eewww. i could not believe it. that is why i am for all nursing students to spend at least a year as a nurses aide or clinical partner or whatever you call it and get down and do the basics of bedside nursing. she was so taken with the charts, the drug book and the doctors that i had to chase her around all night. god, she graduated and got a job on that very unit! no, that is not why i left, but it would be enough. even while i taught high school, before i became a nurse, i banned those damn cell phones from my class. if you have a family emergency, they should have the number of the unit. now i carry a trauma pager but can you imagine, shutting the pager off or turning off the vibrate mode because i am on the phone wit a "friend?" it even bothers me when i see people in traffic talking on the phones. do you remember when you had to find a quarter and a pay phone to call from the road? and, we survived. sheesh. i do not mean to sound pety but imagine the point of view of the patient when the nurse says ,"oh excuse me mrs.smith, i have to get this,"?
good grief. i agree with you totally. especially since i had a not very good bsn graduate nurse who imho didn't know her a$$ from her head.
i received an unsatisfactory for the day one time just because i was doing my homework among a bunch of teenie boppers who werern't doing anything. i got even though. we were in the elevator one day, when i let loose one of the very strong, stinky, silent ones just as the elevator started moving. the stink lingered throughout the ride all the way to the basement, and i walked out of that elevator with a very satisfied look and a smile on my face. one of the teenie boppers got blamed. when i was asked, i just asked; "who me?" then the blame was shifted.
Hello, I am a nursing student. I do not think that what you told this student was anyway inappropriate. If there was some type of emergency or need to keep using his cell phone while you are teaching the student, then it was his responsibility and common courtesy to tell you , before the shift started, that he had something of an important nature going on and that he needed to use his cell phone. It was rude on his part. I work as a CNA on a weekend, night shift and I recently had a new CNA added to my shift to take off some of load as I am the only CNA that works the med surg dept. in our small hospital. The first thing the CNA did was clock in, go to the chair where the doctors dictate, prop her feet up on the desk and proceed to receive and send text messages to her husband who was at home taking care of her 4 children. This went on for several hours and another co-worker from another department approached me and let me know that this girl was showing her Mediaophraphy pictures that her husband was sending her. Here I am working my tail off while she is propped up, sitting in a designated place for doctors and playing on her cell phone, let alone looking at disgusting pictures! I wrote her up and I ended up writing her up several times during the next two weeks. This girl is still working there. Two weeks later, after I found a total care, bed ridden, nursing home patient who had not been turned or changed in over 6 hours that she was assigned to, I took her to an empty room and chewed her out. I told her that I was not going to continue to babysit someone that could not do their job while she stayed on her cell phone the entire night when I had not even been able to take a five minute break. She huffed and puffed and walked off and went right back to her chair and pulled her cell phone out and held it up high so she could see some more pics her husband was sending her. There is a time and a place for cell phones but work is not one of them. Especially in the medical field of such an important nature. If laws are not going to help us then we just have to step up to the plate and take matters in our own hands. I get so tired of being behind people who are about to cause major car accidents because they are using their cell phones and I refuse to pay good money to go to the theatre to watch a movie because of the cell phones that are going off or being flashed all over the place. People need to get a grip and have some good old fashioned manners. PERIOD!:angryfire
Did anything come from the write-up? Perhaps if Nursing managers won't act, the Administrator would like to know that they are paying this person to sit, watch Media, neglect patients, and otherwise violate laws (theft) and ethics. Can the Medical Director help?
As for the student mentioned by the OP, I'd have told him and the Charge Nurse that I was through with him. I don't have the time to fool with people like that. Where do students come off thinking they can do this?
that was terrible!i hope your grandmother lived. i'd consider suing because he or she was on the phone with a non emergency call when your grandmother coded. sorry this happened to hyou.
I am a clinical instructor, and in my syllabus, it states that students are not to bring their cell phones on to the unit. Period. They are given my beeper number and the unit number to give out to family in the event of an emergency. It works quite well. If I see a student pulling out a cell phone, even during post conference, I ask them to take it to their car and come back. The only exception is that if a student tells me their husband is in Iraq and they are expecting a call, I'll ask them to just let me know when the call comes through and to go somewhere private. I can't have zero tolerance for our servicemen and their spouses or girlfriends.
As an instructor, I'd want to hear about the phone calls from the staff nurse. Please make sure that you communicate this to the instructor.
One other important thing to note...we require our students to have a PDA with clinical references (medical dictionary, lab value guide, drug book and clinical disease manual) on it. They are to use it in clinical, instead of carrying the large textbooks to the unit everyday. The only problem that we've had is that a few nurses complained that students were text messaging too much, when in reality they were looking things up and writing in their palm pilot PDA.
Apollorn
60 Posts
On behalf of all nursing students, I apologize. It is not a right, but a privilege, to be mentored by staff.