i was telling the story in another thread about the visitor who brought in the handgun to "put his wife out of her misery" and while he was at it, threatened to put a few nurses out of their misery as well. he was arrested at midnight, spent a few hours in jail and was back in the icu to visit again by 6 am. when we called our manager, her response was "well, he's from montana and everyone in montana carries a gun"! so i got to thinking about some of the dumb things i've seen managers do.
management is a tough job, and someone's got to do it, but sometimes i wonder how they pick them!
there was the manager who wanted me to give 10 mg. of im valium to a visitor who was throwing a fit because her father just died. (dad was in his 90s). the visitor was, admittedly, throwing an award winning fit and the md ordered 10 mg. of valium im to "calm her down." i suggested we send her to the er instead. physician insisted. i refused. nurse manager got involved, and told me to give it. i tried to reason with her. she insisted. i refused. she told me to go to her office and wait for her to discuss my future with the organization. i went, i waited. i heard the code called. nm had given the 10 mg. of im valium to the visitor, whereupon she respiratory arrested. (the discussion didn't go quite as she had intended.)
then there was the manager who wasn't quite sure how to deal with a male nurse i'll call vern. vern was a bit of a practical joker, politically incorrect and had a few other issues as well. one of them was extramarital affairs which shouldn't have been a work issue and probably wouldn't have been had he not had them with patients' family members. he also had a Mediaography habit which was facilitated by the new internet-capable computers we'd had installed at the nurses' station. female nurses were always sitting down the the computers to look up lab values and finding some image of couples in the throes of passion that vern had pulled up, downloaded or installed as a desktop. sometimes it was multiple couple -- but always graphic and Mediaographic. i know the manager talked to him about it a time or two, and i know it was documented since i did some of the documentation myself. but one morning the Mediaographic photograph was adorned with the message "**** me, dr. h_______". the person who sat down at the computer and got the full benefit of vern's handiwork was dr. h's straight-laced, fundamentalist partner. he was not amused. he was most decidedly not amused.
i know vern got suspended because i heard the "conversation" through the closed door of the nurse manager's office and the closed door of the icu. so did everyone else who was working that day, most of the patients and all of the visitors. the suspension was well deserved. so was the 6 months of probation that followed it. what surprised the heck out of me was the fact that vern got promoted to assistant nurse manager while he was still on suspension!
what's the most clueless thing your manager has done?
At a facility where I worked new IV tubing was going to be used, this was when Y tubing for blood and special tubing for hyperal was just starting to be used. (Yes, it was ages ago) the NM had every new grad attend the inservice but did not send one member of the "old" staff to the first 3 inservices. Meanwhile, IV tubing was delivered to the floor, old tubing was taken back to central supply, and we had orders for blood and hyperal out our ears. CN did not even know the set up, sure we figured it out, we just read the insert, but NM reason for not sending the regular staff was "new grads aren't doing anything anyway."
This NM once told me to turn off vent on a patient. Handed patients chart to a strange doctor(later found out he was a lawyer for family) and did not call security when a spouse came to floor and beat wife. Needless to say she was fired but it took a very long time to get her out of the door and many people suffered for her ignorance. She later lost her license for substance abuse.
Hire from the outside when she had well qualified people on the inside who could have taken the position. She stated, she wanted someone that could "think outside the box." Our question was "don't you need someone to know whats in the box, before you hire someone to think outside the box." The learning curve was too great for the new hire, and left after 6 months.
I've been fortunate to have had some very good managers over the years. Have had some charge nurses who weren't worth their weight in saline though.
Here's a fairly recent one: Floated to the tele floor from PCU to orient with an RN so I can learn their charting methods, the flow of the floor, and generally just get a feel for how things go. First shift working this particular floor. Tele and PCU often float RNs back and forth if staffing requires it.
This particular floor has a lot of pt turnover. They see 24 hour holds, stable angina, syncope... basically anything that requires cardiac monitoring. Average patient stay is 29 hours. 4:1 ratio.
During my orientation, we were awaiting the arrival of a R/O MI pt from the ED expected around 2300. We worked together to get all our 2200s passed and finish charting so we could get the admission entered and first meds passed before our break at midnight.
Done and caught up, we still had no new patient @ 2300. ED was busy so we figured they were behind, no big deal... some down time. The rest of the floor was quiet so we pulled up some chairs in the alcove outside the oncoming pts private, darkened room and talked quietly about this and that. Half an hour goes by. Still no patient.
Ten minutes later, a kindly old man walks into the alcove from the room and says, "can I get some help in here?" Our initial thought was, "who the heck is this?"
It turns out that the patient was sitting in the darkened room the whole time, not connected to the monitor, no call light @ BS. He was HOH so he never heard anyone outside. Turns out that when we were finishing our work on the other 3 patients, this one showed up and was received by the charge ... except she never told us she took him in.
We had no reason to go in the room because it was dark and we had prepped it earlier. Architecture doesn't allow us to see in the room directly without going inside, which we had no reason to do. The pt was in the room at least 40 minutes without our knowledge. When we assessed, the patiient was complaining of dynamic 5/10 chest pain.
Once we successfully addressed the issue with SL NTG and 2mg morphine (that were thankfully part of the MDs admission orders), we went to the charge nurse. I was so mad I could spit nails.
The charge claims she told the monitor tech to pass it on to us that the pt had arrived. The tech was shaking her head "no" during the whole exchange. Given past hx with this particular charge, we tended to believe the tech.
I went to the floor manager with the event the next afternoon.
I could go on... this story just sticks out because it was recent.
My manager ranks right up there with all the ones you've all named.
She's so bad, in fact, that I don't know where to even begin. Playing favorites and being disrespectful to staff are certainly among her top sins and are the reason I might just get out of there.
I recentally left a position of 16months for reasons related to poor/clueless management. Some highlights:
After have losing over a third of your aide staff in a couple months to start screaming in the hallway (in from of other staff and pts) at one of our floors hard-working aids that "IF YOU DON"T LIKE IT HERE YOU CAN JUST LEAVE!!!" Needless to say, that girl gave her notice on the spot.
When questioned as to what our nurse manager was doing about replacing all of the staff that had quit (again, lost over a third in a few months, yet no one new hired), she stated that there was "Absolutely no one out there left to hire" I work in a major US city, can you say liar?
When I hurt myself at work, which conincidentally was a week after my transfer went through to another department, my boss told Employee Health that even though she did not no the extent of my injury, she would be unable to accommodate me at work until I was medically cleared. I stormed into her office, with a dr's note stating I CAN work as long as I don't lift over 15lbs with my left arm. She told me that I was useless to her without my left arm. I had injured the same arm the same way 6 months prior and she had accommodated me, but now she made an issue of it. I told her I could still do my job minus the lifting (ie vital signs, call lights, blood sugars, stocking). She had the nerve to say "how are you planning on doing those tasks, I don't think you can pump up a blood pressure cuff with that arm?| Um, I have a right arm to pump with. The best part is she finally agreed to let me work because "we now have enough staff to accomodate your injury, and before we didn't" I worked my first shift back from medical leave with 37 pts, 4 nurses, and I aide (me). Sure sounds like adequate staffing!
Needless to say, I'm thrilled to be out of that mess, and I LOVE my new boss. She's very understanding, flexible, and treats me with respect.
Oh I have one for you. I was called one morning at 11 am and asked to come in on spur of moment. I got there by noon. I was met by the enraged night nurse who demanded to know why I didn't show up by 9am like I said I would. She had agreed to stay over till nine because she was told I had already agreed to come in. I was like "huh, manager just called me at 11". They had told her a bold faced lie just to get her to stay. We went in together to confront the manager and she giggled and blushed and said that "sometimes it is OK for managment to bend the truth a little just to get the job done". I have never trusted anyone in managment from that day till this because I suspect that a lot of them believe that:scrm:it is ok to lie and cheat to get things done. It wasn't just that they lied to her but then they did not even bother to pick up the phone and call me till 11am when at 7am they had told her I already agreed to do it. Don't they realize that when you catch them in lies like that it makes you realize they are most likely lying about other things and you just have not caught on yet. :sasq:
Lets not forget how clueless our administration is...A friend of mine posted something about her unit on a nursing website about how she hated her unit, she specifically named the unit and hospital, then went on to ask about various positions at other hospitals. The VP of nursing at her hospital saw the post on the website, printed it off and showed it to all of the unit managers. I felt that was very appropriate *insert sarcasm*....They didn't know it was her though until she finally put in her resignation and told the unit manager which health system she was going to.
so true -- my favorite clueless manager is now don!
my previous don padded her resume' and had less than 1 yr as an rn. she had been fired during her orientation at her first job, then came to our hospital. she lasted 9 mos b/f admin finally got a clue that she was clueless, (despite what staff was telling them!) and her references had never been checked!! (all this came to light after the fact). rumor has it that she moved out of state & is now a don again!!
Our hospital chain was in the process of closing a hospital in an upper lower class blue collar neighborhood and opening another one on the opposite side of the county (near where all the rich folks -- including many of the docs -- live). We got a new NM transferred in from the old hospital. She was p.o'd about it all. She had even bought a house across the street from the old hospital and now she had to drive half an hour to work. (Oh, poor pitiful her, there were several staff who drove 70 to 90 minutes ONE WAY.)
She came to our floor miserable and ticked off, and preceeded to make all of us miserable and ticked off. Our floor, which was pretty good, suddenly lost morale and staff. When eval time came, she made sure we all knew we sucked and sucked badly.
They finally closed our unit for renovation (and gave this NM a new unit where she handpicked her staff). When our unit re-opened 6 months later, we had a new NM who was a good bit better. Several times during that "floating" period I was floated to the original hateful NM's floor and was oddly tickled to see that it was the most disorganized, crazily run floor I had been on in many years. Even with her handpicking whom she wanted to work on her floor, it was a mess -- due to her rules and the way she wanted things ran.
One of my favorite clueless nurse manager situtions was when we had a code blue at shift change. Long story short - I did not clock out until 0930 - 2 and a half hours overtime. My nurse manager was on duty during the code, she knew i was involved with the code and when she saw me clock out - SHE SCREAMED at me for monoplizing the time-clock and manipulating my salary. At thatr point i had enough, but decided to run with it. I asked her what she thought I should have done differently. She said clock out and return to the code blue!!! Risk my license - I DONT THINK SO!!!
Remember all, the rule is that if you work in managemant or administration - common sense and normalcy have to fall out of you head when you apply - remember to put that on your resume when u apply.
I feel like all managers care about is the budget. At least that's how it was at my last job. Budget, budget, budget.."I know we have confused patients who need a sitter but we can't have a sitter because we'll be over budget so you'll have to pull one of the aides to sit with the patient"...usually this meant that two of the three aides we had each shift would be responsible for 32 patients.
When I left I changed all the screensavers to "The budget is the center of all we do"..I couldn't help myself.
The best part is she finally agreed to let me work because "we now have enough staff to accomodate your injury, and before we didn't" I worked my first shift back from medical leave with 37 pts, 4 nurses, and I aide (me). Sure sounds like adequate staffing!
barefootlady, ADN, RN
2,174 Posts
At a facility where I worked new IV tubing was going to be used, this was when Y tubing for blood and special tubing for hyperal was just starting to be used. (Yes, it was ages ago) the NM had every new grad attend the inservice but did not send one member of the "old" staff to the first 3 inservices. Meanwhile, IV tubing was delivered to the floor, old tubing was taken back to central supply, and we had orders for blood and hyperal out our ears. CN did not even know the set up, sure we figured it out, we just read the insert, but NM reason for not sending the regular staff was "new grads aren't doing anything anyway."
This NM once told me to turn off vent on a patient. Handed patients chart to a strange doctor(later found out he was a lawyer for family) and did not call security when a spouse came to floor and beat wife. Needless to say she was fired but it took a very long time to get her out of the door and many people suffered for her ignorance. She later lost her license for substance abuse.