Is nursing like...

[tiij]

hey,

after watching scrubs and house.. i wanted to know.. do nurses exist in the US? Or do the doctors take obs and give meds.. like they do in house? if so.. what do nurses do?

haha.. im not being sarcastic.. i know you guys do the same as aussie nurses.. but where the hell do these sterotypes come from? its just a disgrace.. doctors dont hang out on the wards with the odd nurse walking past every 10 mins.. at least not at my hosptial!

[Blue IIs]

I just recently have a family member ask me why the doctor wasn't there while I was giving albumin to try and raise my pt's blood pressure. She was serious and I had to explain that the doctor's are not generally there while we do patient care. They trust us to know what we are doing and expect us to do it. I spent precious minutes on the phone explaining instead of being with my patient because she had a misconception perpetrated by television.

[Diary/Dairy, RN]

Wow, Blue, I knew some people are demanding, but unless you are at a teaching hosp., there are no MD's around in the middle of the night!!

[teeituptom, BSN, RN]

I just recently have a family member ask me why the doctor wasn't there while I was giving albumin to try and raise my pt's blood pressure. She was serious and I had to explain that the doctor's are not generally there while we do patient care. They trust us to know what we are doing and expect us to do it. I spent precious minutes on the phone explaining instead of being with my patient because she had a misconception perpetrated by television.

I havent used Albumin in a long time.

[RNDreamer]

I watch a lot of Discovery Health shows like "Special Delivery" (I think that's the name, it is show about high risk pregnancies), "Impact:Stories of survival", "Untold Stories of the ER", and "Code Blue". The baby show is where I see more of what nurses do, and I know they are nurses because they are identified when speaking on camera or caring for the mom to be. In the other shows, I see a lot of doctor-patient interactions, and nurses mostly in the background. Now, I am reading the posts about the innacurate portrayal of nurses in House, ER, etc. What about the shows I mentioned? Is the ER a unit where you will encounter more time with the doctors, or do you feel these shows also contribute to the innacurate portrayals? TIA!