First off, I just want to say that I'm a nursing student. I start my clinicals in January, so I haven't had experience out in the field as a "professional", I've only had experience as a patient.
My gripe as I've been through some health problems with headaches and my head and neck these passed few weeks is this:
I feel like I could have been better informed by doctors on several areas, including: explaining my diagnosis before "shooing me" out of the room, prescribing me the right medication (I was prescribed a medication that is well known to interact with another medication that I'm currently taking), prescribing a lower dose of a medication that I'm currently taking without discussing with me the intense side effects that go along with lowering a dose of this particular medicine, and listening to me and my issues before jumping to conclusions and sending me to another specialist or out for another test.
All of these things happened in a reputable practice of a reputable hospital.
My question is this:
As a nurse, do you find this to be common practice by doctors? Do you find that people (doctors, nurses) are not always as thorough as they should be? If this is common, how do you react to the other professionals if an ethical issue is crossed? Do you find that you become more lax as a professional when others where you work are more lax? Do you feel that these people lack the knowledge or are they just being lazy?
In my personal opinion, and because I am extremely detail oriented, I don't know that I could get along in a situation where patients where not being well informed, and the professionals were not "doing their job". Is this as common as I think it is?
I almost feel like I'm going to spend all this time learning important material in nursing school, only to find that no one cares when I get out and do my job. Any thoughts or words of wisdom?
Try working a 12 hour shift taking care of 7 patients. There is the ideal/holy grail of thorough, and then the actual reality of the nursing world.
That's oh-so-true... I just wish my nursing instructors had admitted to that. They would get all over us for the smallest things. I can understand that they don't want to train up nurses with bad habits but by emphasizing the importance of getting everything right every time meant that we didn't learn how to cope with situations where we can't get everything done just so.
november17, ASN, RN
1 Article; 980 Posts
Try working a 12 hour shift taking care of 7 patients. There is the ideal/holy grail of thorough, and then the actual reality of the nursing world.