I'm a little upset about something I read on Facebook tonight. Let me start by saying, I usually take things with a grain of salt when it comes to Facebook, but something about this has rubbed me the wrong way. This post comes from an "experienced" nurse and self-proclaimed DON. My issue is not with the care the pts loved one received, but how this nurse vented her feelings towards all new nurses.
Let's all save ourselves the aggravation and debate and agree that what happened to the patient is wrong, and does not work in a culture where Zero Harm should be the goal; however, to say "New nurses are coming out with an insufferable, know-it-all attitude, and overconfident in their skills. New nurses, you're pissing this veteran off". Wait what did just read??? Surely ALL new nurses do not fit this mold, and to assume all new nurses are this way is just wrong.
She also goes on to say "You're the reason I won't hire a nurse with less than three years in the field. I would have fired you for this, and the two nurses before you for patient negligence. I've fired people over less. I hold my nurses to my personal standard, and that bar is set high, ladies and gentlemen. Shame on this nurse. I am embarrassed to call her a member of my noble profession. "
I get it, she's upset, her family member was hurt, but to say that she won't hire new nurses and that these three nurses should be embarrassed to nurses is WRONG. She has forgotten what it is like to go to work everyday terrified that because she is a new nurse she might kill someone. WE ARE ALL HUMAN, mistakes will be made; however, we need the experienced nurses to teach, and to guide and mentor the next generation. Maybe that is what is wrong with that ICU unit is that there isn't a good training program. This is not what I want the public to think about nurses. We should be team members, build each other up, because if one of us falls we all should. Shame on her... I am embarrassed to call her a member of my noble profession.
I am an ICU Charge Nurse and can be classified as a "new" nurse, I can take care of septic patients, balloon pumps patients, swan ganz patients, trauma patients, intraventricular drain and monitoring patients, be a rapid response team member, expert IV access member, code blue and trauma leader, while being an expert consult to the rest of the hospital staff (nurses with 30 plus years experience mind you), but I don't care scissors in my pockets so I must be a total failure as a nurse and human being. Man I didn't realize that not having scissors and not doing a immediate skin assessment while my other patient is coding and dying meant I was a horrible nurse and failure as a human being. What a joke! This nurse needs a big dose of reality and realize not everybody is perfect, including herself.
I saw the original post on my Facebook feed, shared by several nursing coworkers and friends.
I agree the nurse made several good points, but her delivery was so off putting that I instantly disregarded most of her message. She came off as arrogant, overly involved, and dramatic.
The cursing in particular was very unprofessional and embarrassing to the nursing profession. When people use that much profanity, I can't take them seriously. Self control should be present.
I find the whole thing very embarrassing to nursing. Errors were made by the hospital, and her sister in law could make some valid complaints about her care. It's not the patient complaining though... And that's a little disturbing. I wonder how okay with all of this her sister in law (the patient) is.
Can someone PM me this post? Or tell me how to find this? This thread is difficult to follow without the source material. I don't know why it can't be posted here, given that it sounds as though the originator of this this FB took it upon herself to make it public in the first place.
I guess the TOS say that we can not post links to social media sites. I have cut pasted the original post below as it appears on Facebook. This persons FB page is not private and is still public as of this morning:
Since T put it out there, I'm assuming she won't mind me saying something, and to use this as a teaching point for everyone.
Let me make this disclaimer first:... I am NOT, by any means, a "super nurse". I'm in no way perfect. I've missed things before. However, what I'm about to tell you made me see red, and black. Just look at the picture.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I don't know what has happened to nursing school, but I don't like it. New nurses are coming out with an insufferable, know-it-all attitude, and overconfident in their skills.
New nurses, you're pissing this veteran off.
Yesterday when I received the information that my dear sister-in-law was in the ICU with a brain bleed, I headed right over.
I was so relieved when she looked at me with those big, brown eyes and said that she as ok, I couldn't think about anything else. After I hugged her within an inch of her life (I say that ironically), just relieved that she was ok, and some good natured ribbing, these old nursing eyes started taking in what I was seeing.
I noticed the significant bruising on her right arm from multiple failed IV attempts and blood draws. It was bad. She was purple to damn near her fingertips. She told me that she felt alright, but her arm was causing her pain. At first, I thought it was the BP cuff pushing on the bruises, but I looked and it wasn't in an inflation cycle.
I ripped the cuff off, and found a pressure dressing, placed by someone, almost 18 hours before. (I know this because she told me, no one had tried anything on that arm in quite some time due to the massive bruising and trauma.)
A pressure dressing. One that should have been taken off ages before.
Then someone slapped a BP cuff on top of it, and it was quickly forgotten.
After seeing this, I started clawing at the damn thing, but it was ON THERE. I ran to the nursing station and demanded a pair of bandage scissors to cut the damn thing off, and the nurse looked at me and said "I don't have any."
Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!
I told her the situation, and went back into the room and started clawing at it again, almost deciding to run to my car and get my own bandage scissors, until the nurse took a poll of the ICU to see who had some. She finally located a pair and we got the dressing off. The color returned to T's hand pretty quickly, and her pain was eased.
Now, I'm going to tell you the real issue here, and if you're a new grad nurse, or in nursing school, listen the **** up.
A HEAD TO TOE ASSESSMENT isn't just something you do to please your instructor. It is ABSOLUTELY VITAL to look at every INCH of your patient, EVERY shift. YES, turn them over and take a good look at that butt, too.
If the 3 nurses who had contact with her after the dressing was applied had DONE THEIR JOB, this would have never happened. She may have been uncomfortable for an hour or two, and that's it. Not ONE of them noticed that her arm was purple and COLD.
So what, a dressing was left on her arm. This wasn't just any dressing. Someone had wrapped her antecubital space so tightly with Coban and gauze, that it was severely compromising her arm circulation. This could have caused a blood clot that killed her or compromised her arm so badly that she could have lost fingers. She was already in there for a blood issue. It seems clot prevention would be a priority.
Her blood pressure cuff was OVER this bulk of dressing, pushing painfully on the dressing every fifteen minutes. Does that nurse want to look me in the eye and tell me that ANY BP READING since that's been there is accurate?? Not to mention that to begin with, the placement of the cuff was completely off. I had to go to the nurses station to find someone, despite the bells and whistles that were going off at the station saying the machine couldn't get a reading. Not one of them came to see why. I'm sure there's never anything wrong with an ICU patient when the cuff can't get a reading.
Please, continue to sit there and look at me like I'm the problem.
She's in the ICU for a brain bleed and increased ICP (intracranial pressure, not the insane clown posse, which in its own way is a relief). Don't you want to MAKE SURE that your BLOOD PRESSURE readings, of ALL things, are accurate. Those nurses have now listed a day's worth of erroneous and inaccurate vital signs in her chart, not to mention possibly misleading the physician's conclusion about her condition.
Then in my frantic attempt to get the thing off, in an ICU full of nurses, no one had a pair of scissors. No one. She had to go to the adjoining CCU to find a pair.
A damn ICU nurse with NO bandage scissors.
When I was on the floor, (now in my medical bag), my pockets and coat pockets were ALWAYS loaded down. I was taught that some things need to be on your person at ALL TIMES: a pair of safety bandage scissors, a penlight, a sharpie marker, pens with blue, black and red ink, a dry erase marker, a highlighter, a portable pulse ox monitor, your stethoscope, your identification, alcohol swabs and some small gauze. I also always carried a small, simple calculator, a small notepad and rolls of both paper and plastic tape. Call me old school if you want to, but those are the tools of our trade. A cop wouldn't go to work without a gun and handcuffs. A surgeon wouldn't perform surgery without a scalpel. How can she accurately document neuro checks without a penlight to check pupil dilation? What if a dressing was on way too tight and you need to quickly cut it off? What if the power goes out and you need to calculate a dosage on the spot. OBVIOUSLY none of them worked through Hurricane Katrina.
For Christ's sake.
When she saw my anxiety, she could not understand. After the dressing was off, she said it was "no big thing". Really? It took every ounce of my self control to not punch her directly in the face. I informed her that she would need to write an incident report in case there were later complications, and she looked at me like I had grown a second head and walked away.
As I was leaving, I asked her how long she had been a nurse. With a smirk she told me a year.
I promise you, it was less.
I took this picture of her arm after the dressing was removed. You can still see the indents from the Coban.
New nurses, get your **** together.
ACTUALLY DO your assessment. Carry what you need on your person. If a ******* alarm goes off, get off your ass and check it, EVEN IF IT IS NOT YOUR PATIENT. Take pride in your work. And finally, LOOK AND LISTEN. Listen to what the patient is telling you (she had been complaining for a while). LISTEN to the body of the patient. OBSERVE abnormalities and do something to fix it. LISTEN to what us decade-plus nurses are telling you. Don't take umbrage at what I'm saying just because I'm "old school" or "that's not the way you were taught". DO YOUR JOB.
Also, don't sit up at the nursing station and ***** about your job. Your patients CAN hear you. A patient should never, EVER, made to feel like an inconvenience. If they do feel that way, they can put themselves at a higher risk of injury because they "didn't want to bother you."
It takes years, sometimes decades, to hone your nursing skills to the point of confidence and best possible care and practices.
I learn something new DAILY.
My education did NOT stop the moment I got that RN license in my hot little hand. I was trained by some of the best nurses on the planet. Most of my nursing knowledge came on the hospital floor, in the trenches, with those incredibly brilliant RNs, NOT from a classroom or an instructor holding my hand through clinical rounds.
In short, stop acting like you know everything.
I've got 14 years of this on you, and I STILL don't know everything.
You're the reason I won't hire a nurse with less than three years in the field. I would have fired you for this, and the two nurses before you for patient negligence. I've fired people over less. I hold my nurses to my personal standard, and that bar is set high, ladies and gentlemen.
Shame on this nurse. I am embarrassed to call her a member of my noble profession.
(This is also why I'm a DON now. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.)
I am an ICU Charge Nurse and can be classified as a "new" nurse, I can take care of septic patients, balloon pumps patients, swan ganz patients, trauma patients, intraventricular drain and monitoring patients, be a rapid response team member, expert IV access member, code blue and trauma leader, while being an expert consult to the rest of the hospital staff (nurses with 30 plus years experience mind you)...
Specializes in Pharmaceutical Research, Operating Room.
You can always do what I did, so as not to get pi$$ed off every time some idiot puts something on Facebook - defriend EVERYBODY except for your family and the closest actual friends you have. By actual friends, I mean people you actually, you know, speak with on the phone (gasp!) and hang out with (GASP!) on a regular basis. I did that and now I think I have a total of 30 Facebook friends, most of which are family members. The only reason I haven't deactivated my account yet is because my sister lives in a foreign country and she puts amazing pictures of her life in said country on Facebook regularly.
By defriending just about everybody I was connected with, I eliminated a LOT of negativity from my life. Who cares what this person says, especially since she's not even somebody that's important in your life?? Live your life, do what's good for you and your family, try to be the best person and nurse you can be, and keep it moving. Small minded idiots spouting off from behind the safety of a computer screen are NOT worth your time and all the energy you are putting into being angry about it. I guarantee that, if you were to confront this person about her words, she wouldn't dare say them to your face. Again, cowards behind computer screens.
The more we are connected by "social media", the more we isolate ourselves from the people that truly matter in our lives. Try removing it from your life, at least a little bit, and see how much more peace of mind you have! Just my 2 cents!
I, sorry for the details, peed in my new Banana Republic pants laughing reading the original FB post.
I'd seen so, so many of them. Here comes Her Highest Majesty The Best Nurse priding herself immensely upon her unfailing skill of having bandage scissors with her at all times, and not having the slightest idea that in ICU they are needed rarely, if ever at all. But it just doesn't fit in Her Majesty's picture of reality, so she gets out proudly bashing her ignorance for the whole world to see.
So, if I carry everything Her Highest Majesty apparently does plus tourniquet, flashes, 50 cc NS bag, IV start kit, Koban roll, ECG pads, IllumiVein, 3M sticks, pieces of WoundVac film, 8 pens, 2 lights and Micromedex running on my smartphone, does it mean that I just must be that many times better nurse, or just a born pack rat with too many pockets too big? Honestly suspect the second... am I right?
In the very depth of my heart, I pity these so-called "nurses". They are so burned out that they remind dying coals, still too hot to held but never, ever able to ignite a flame. No question, what happened with her SO was a good near miss and should be pointed out as yet another thing to watch for, but to try to clawe and tear the things off as if a human life depended on it was just about as mature and professional as throwing hysterics because of one 10 cc IV flash "not accounted for". Poor soul who is spending minutes of her only one life on thrashing others, I so hope she will never encounter any new nurse in her life. Both sides do not deserve it.
applesxoranges, BSN, RN
2,242 Posts
A lesson all nurses should take from this is to not rant about stuff on Facebook with a real account.