Let me just say that I have no experience in the healthcare field so this post is base off of everyday life. I am entering the nursing program this fall so i guess i will find out in the near future.....but
Are the nurses who complain just plain lazy or are these hospitals/being a nurse... just that hard?
Throughout my years of working, i find that most of the work is manageable, yet you always have people complain on how hard the job is and how much work they have to do.
Are the complaints of being overworked/overloaded indicative of the life of a typical nurse?
"Are the nurses who complain just plain lazy..." ROFL....
Excuse me while I go make some freshly-popped popcorn and hunker down to watch the self-hanging continue...
Especially starting off with "I have no healthcare experience" and "I'll be starting nursing school soon."
OP get a job as a aide so you can see some of what we do every day. There's a reason a job that only requires an associate's degree pays as well as it does.
....Or I go into an isolation room of patient I had day before. He needs an IV abx. I know I left my tubing from yesterday in there initialed, capped, dated, and out of the way so I don't need new tubing. Wrong. The night shift threw it out. Ungown, unglove, wash hands, get tubing, repeat in reverse...
I could go on all day, but these are the sorts of things that make nursing frustrating and keep you running back and forth.
blondy2061h, just have to do a thread hijack here...there was nobody else on the floor who could bring you a new package of tubing? (we used to have a lot of patients in isolation- I know what a sweaty, time-consuming, nose-running hassle it can be LOL)
But yes, OP, if I came on here and talked about what a great day I had when nobody at all yelled at me, all patients brought their meds including everything from every specialist to their appointments and their glucometers too and brought the detailed log books they were keeping, nobody noshowed, there were no suicide calls, and insurance covered every med the doc ordered, I would be charting on Allnurses in my sleep during a very good dream. It really is a blessing to be able to vent here.
Let me just say that I have no experience in the healthcare field so this post is base off of everyday life. I am entering the nursing program this fall so i guess i will find out in the near future.....but
Are the nurses who complain just plain lazy or are these hospitals/being a nurse... just that hard?
Throughout my years of working, i find that most of the work is manageable....
Working at what? You just said you are not a nurse. You cannot compare nursing to any other job.
My experience with nursing has been that it is very polar. It seems to me that you are either having a great day in which everything is easily managed and you are on top of things without breaking a sweat...........or you are having a day that is impossible on every level. Not much in between really, its either one or the other.
So, when people have one of those bad days, they "vent" (as others have pointed out, a lot of venting goes on here and in RL with nurses) about it. People outside the profession sometimes get the impression that every day is that way, but we are simply venting about it. As another post pointed out, we don't go around venting about the good days so, people listening to us can definitely get an skewed view of what things are really like. They only hear about the bad days. They know every day is not really that bad, see nurses talking about the bad days...............so on so forth.
I will say this though, and it might be part of why you are wondering if nurses are "lazy" or not. I do notice, there seems to be a fairly sized portion of nurses who don't get over the bad days well. They never seem to move on. They'll ruin their own good days reliving the bad days. Just the other day, I watched as an IV nurse stood at the nurse's station and spent 45min. complaining about problems that.........take less than 5min. to solve. The reality was though that she was still unhappy about a different/recent day that truly was bad for her. So, it wasn't so much that she was having a bad day currently and needed to vent but that she was still venting about the day last week that bothered her so much. During the 45min. she stood at the nurses station complaining, her beeper went off twice and she ignored it to finish venting. Definitely someone who needs to "move on".
Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.
Let me just say that I have no experience in the healthcare field so this post is base off of everyday life. I am entering the nursing program this fall so i guess i will find out in the near future.....but
Are the nurses who complain just plain lazy or are these hospitals/being a nurse... just that hard?
Throughout my years of working, i find that most of the work is manageable, yet you always have people complain on how hard the job is and how much work they have to do.
Are the complaints of being overworked/overloaded indicative of the life of a typical nurse?
Maybe the best answer is to let you find out on your own.
Oh yeah it is that hard. I got home at 2:30 am last night. Suppose to leave at 11:30. One rapid response, one obnoxiously rude patient, one in restraints, one bleeding all over the place after removing the foley catheter and then continuous bladder irrigation after that, then same patient becoming combative and agitated, another with nausea and pain all shift, and the cherry on the top was the one RUDE MD. Didin't eat until 1 AM.
Thank God not all shifts are like that but it is still a really busy job on regular shifts. It is a must to work in a place with great co-workers to survive.
DizzyLizzyNurse
1,024 Posts
Especially starting off with "I have no healthcare experience" and "I'll be starting nursing school soon."
OP get a job as a aide so you can see some of what we do every day. There's a reason a job that only requires an associate's degree pays as well as it does.