Literacy: A good quality in a unit secretary

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

this is a vent. this is only a vent.

our unit secretaries are lovely women. but so far as i've noticed, none of them (well, maybe one of them) can read or write or do "complicated math." you know, stuff like "we have 16 beds and 15 patients plus 2 in the or and three transfers out. how many beds will we have available at 7 pm?"

if you're in an isolation room doing a sterile dressing change or trying to stem the river of poop your patient is disgorging, and someone wants to talk to you on the phone, the secretaries page overhead "ruby, you have a phone call on line 1." followed immediately by "ruby, it's line 3." (they cannot even keep straight which line your call is on, which causes a lot of hard feelings from family members who have to hold forever and then get the wrong nurse and have to hold some more.) if you don't answer your call immediately, they'll page again. it seems they cannot be separated from facebook long enough to get up, come to the door of your room and find out why you aren't answering the phone. nor will they take messages. i only recently discovered that two of the secretaries don't take messages because they cannot read or write and the other two think it's beneath them.

i've always known our secretaries couldn't spell. you'd be surprised how many ways they can "spell" ruby. (roobee, rubbee, rubbie, rube, etc.) but it wasn't until, in a housekeeping frenzy, our manager rearranged all the forms at the secretary's desk that i realized they couldn't read. they had memorized the location of the forms they'd need and just grabbed them. it helped that so many of the forms were color coded.

now management is requiring a literacy test before hiring unit secretaries. i think it's a marvelous idea, but you would not believe how much resistance it's getting. you would think that literacy would be a job requirement. not so much, i guess.

[TDCHIM]

My God, I don't know what to say. How could you POSSIBLY be a unit secretary and be partially or fully illiterate? That's crazy! If literacy isn't already part of the job description, it should be, and the literacy test should be a non-negotiable. These people aren't working at McDonald's, for heaven's sake!

I am really sorry, Ruby - that sounds like an awful mess. I hope management pushes through that literacy test regardless of the resistance!

[RPN_2012]

Wow! Just wow!

[canoehead, BSN, RN]

Whoa.

1) No more Facebook, ever.

2) For families on hold longer than 30 seconds. Take a message and the nurse will call you back within the next 15 min.

3) They each get a big pretty sticker for knowing their colors. Anyone that doesn't know the alphabet gets a pink slip, and everyone else gets remedial classes unless they take and PASS that literacy test.

[oramar]

I have never run into this since most of them were as smart or smarter than me. Only problem I ever encountered, in a VERY small number of cases, was a tendency to play those all to familiar political games you run into on a unit. The vast majority were great people and a big help. Especially when it came to identifying and ordering rarely seen test ordered by MDs. They must have thought I was mentally deficient in some of those cases.LOL I am sure you make allowances for a person having bad day or getting a little flusted, if it happened all the time I could see how you would get frustrated.

[OCNRN63, RN]

Epic FAIL.

[Hospice Nurse LPN, BSN, RN]

Wow! I don't even know how to respond to that.

[iNurseUK, RN]

We'd be lost without our excellent ward clerks. The great unsung heroines of the NHS.

Never met an illiterate one yet. Some are better than others and my current one is brilliant.

All hail the ward clerk. We are not worthy:bow:

[AKAnurse4]

Lol omgosh how did they become EMPLOYED!!!!!!!!????????

[nursemike, ASN, RN]

So happy to live in WV, where almost everyone knows how to read and write. There's something to be said for a hopelessly outdated school system.

[OttawaRPN]

How is it possible to graduate high school illiterate?

[cmonkey]

How is it possible to graduate high school illiterate?

You'd be surprised how easy it is. Perhaps 'surprised' is the wrong word.