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.
