Looked stupid in front of new boss

Published Jun 25, 2019

74 Posts

So my favorite home health agency that I currently work for is being sold, and yesterday without any warning, the outgoing DON informed me that the incoming DON will be joining me on a visit so that I could orient her. Now of course I’m just a staff nurse, so why would I be orienting an experienced DON?

I definitely had it in my head that she was probably shadowing all of the nurses. I have never met her before, so it’s not as if we met in the office and now we were going on the field together, this was my first time meeting her.

I have seven years of experience in home health and I’m very confident in my skills. If I was teaching a new HH nurse, I would be able to breeze through my visit and explain everything. And even if there is an emergency in the home or someone is panicking, I have a reputation of remaining calm. But anytime that I feel like I’m being tested or judged, I just completely freeze up. Like I forget my own name practically.

So on this particular visit, I made one stupid error after another, including missing the fact that the pharmacy did not include a stat lock in the picc line dressing change supplies, and then having everything ready and starting the dressing change and not realizing I had no stat lock until the old one had already been thrown away.

And because I became so flustered by the stupid mistake, I am thinking back and pretty sure that I broke sterile technique during the rest of the botched dressing change.

This was also the first warm day we’ve had in a long time, so the patient’s ceiling fan was on, I didn’t even notice or take that into account during the dressing change until the new DON mentioned it.

I went back to the office and got a stat lock and came back to see the patient and fix that. This is a patient I’ve been seeing for a while and we have a good rapport, she thought I was training that nurse and when I told her it was my new supervisor she did laugh out loud and said she was sorry that had happened.

And I basically spent all night last night going through my head and thinking of all the other little things I probably did wrong. It’s so frustrating, it’s almost like anytime I am told that I’m being observed, I just push a clown button on myself and all my skills go out the window.