All this talk of professionalism and being respected by doctors makes me sick.
I am a professional. I am a nurse. My job is to diagnose and treat human responses to illness (care for the sick). I also educate patients, assess their physical condition, and rehabilitate them. Society considers an RN a professional position, so I am a professional. I am not a doctor, I don't work for a doctor; I am not a doctor's assistant. I work for my hospital and my nurse manager.
A doctor is an academically prepared individual who diagnoses and treats medical problems in human beings. We use doctors in caring for patients who have medical problems. We need their medical orders (orders for the patient--not orders to us as in "ordering" us to do something), because we can't legally administer medical interventions without them, why? because we are nurses not doctors!
I'm in the profession of caring for people, especially sick people, and in my case especially sick people with cardiac conditions. So, naturally I have problems with the nurse practioner being considered an "advance practice nurse." In reality they are a doctor's assistant. Our professionalism does not come by being more like a doctor but by being more of a nurse.
I respect doctors, but then I respect patients as well, and I respect strangers on the street. Doctors are not nurses, and I feel they are missing out on the greatest spiritual vocation available. If they think they are above me, professionally, then they are as misguided as the nurse who thinks he's not a professional if he can't write a prescription for amoxacillin.
Specializes in ER, PED'S, NICU, CLINICAL M., ONCO..
OK Plato, as I can see your point of view doesn't differ much of mine. Of course, we work in different scenarios but the medullar question seems to be same.
Please everybody take in consideration that my opinion comes from a different background of yours. Some people can judge Plato's thread as being 20 year out of time, however it is completely current for my working place.
I'm a RN, BSN, with only ten years in nursing, nevertheless I passed through five different health institutions, one of them related to the equivalent to yours "911", as paramedic, performing home care as well.
It is a popular conviction that physicians "KNOW" and nurses are to perform wiping butts only and to obey physicians' orders.
I almost go mad, every day when patients or their relatives call me "doctor", because they cannot accept a nurse with autonomy.
They say things like; "I guess you will become a doctor very soon".
My answer is always the same: "if I wanted to be a doctor, I would be a doctor... I am a Nurse!
I also go mad when my coworkers limit themselves to obey blindly physician's orders, putting in danger our patients security.
The LPN is a figure created by physicians to work as their helpers also in my country and that is a general belief among doctors and lay people, related to all categories of nursing.
US suffer a tremendous nursing shortage. Statistics for the next ten years talk of about a million nurses deficit. If the nursing status were so bright as many of you pretend to paint, there wouldn't be that shortage.
The British nurses complain about the same subjects we do. I guess we have an international problem related to the nursing issue.
Many of you might have a job in the Paradise but this is not the reality for most of us.
The nursing profession is in danger, if someone denies that demonstrates that he/she is living in a bubble of soap.
We are not doctors, however we are neither doctor's servants nor patients servants.... We are nurses, caregivers, guardians, protectors and whatever you want to add. In addition, for that many special qualities are required.
We are nurses because we are special. Not everyone can be so special. No everyone can be a nurse. Therefore, we should be paid and treated in consequence.
This is the point, some day, hopefully, there is going to be only one category of nurses, meanwhile, we have to defend our profession with sword and fist.
I am always thrilled when my orienting nurse asks me to do stuff because to me it means she trusts my skills! Sounds like you had some pretty bad experiences.
I agree, I'm excited to get asked to do stuff. We even discussed this in class recently...that it makes us feel good when they trust us to handle something for them. I also haven't seen any students roll their eyes or make themselves scarce when asked to do something,....maybe things are still pretty new for us but I can imagine we'd get in some serious trouble for doing so. :) We actually got a lecture on behavior before we started, but that was more on not being in the way or annoying. I'm having fun anyway, tired, but enjoying it. I think we all are.
I'm new here and not quite a student yet, though going for CNA classes soon, so forgive my ignorince and I'm not here to start anything.
"I would be willing to bet that the attitude you displayed here comes through loud and clear in your clinical time, no matter how "sweet" you may think you are being."
She did not seem to have any attitude and she only mentioned her own personal, though limited, experiance of the nurses she's seen, to add to the discussion, untill later because of comments made towards her.
Jumping in and saying it's her attitude alone is just like her saying it's 75% when she probably hasn't even meet that number of the nurse's at that facility, and she may have exagerted, but who's to say that 75% of the nurses she works with aren't bad at their jobs, I can imagine it's different in every town and every hospitial.
"Personally, I don't want the students I work with to be sweet.
For some, also, being sweet is a positive character trait that they feel they can rely on in the big world. Whether it's right or not, it's what they feel and that could change. They are usally the type of people that are more willing to help where they can, and lift some of the burden, because they feel they are being "sweet" and helpful.
"It can be very tiresome when students ask questions that show quite clearly that they haven't prepared."
But, and I don't mean to use this as a lame excuse, they are students, they aren't prepared, they are preparing. That's why students are doing the clinicals, I would think, to get hands on experiance and learn, it's still learning and learning comes along with questions.
Also it shows that they don't understand something but asking a question about it, shows their desire to understand it better, so they may do the best they can. I would hope that a nurse would rather a student nurse ask a question, rather than allowing the student nurse to pretend they already know, in order to save face and than allowing them to take on a task they don't fully understand.
Of course, I understand, nurse's can't always be bothered with questions, they are busy, more likely than not, they are stressed, tired and don't want to have to deal with it. That's cool, but it's not always the students fault that they may not understand what a more experianced nurse may be doing, it may not have been taught, or as it is in most cases in my experiance, it's a lot different seeing it done, than it is reading and taking notes about it. It's the same difference between life experiance and book learning, it's different, and one can't always be learned from the other, no matter how much you study.
I'm not a nurse, so I don't pretend to know what they have to deal with, and it's just a limited knowledge and opinon, and I apologize if I offended anyone or seemed rude. Please, correct me if I'm wrong in anything I've said here, everyone's experiance is different and can be learned from.
"So, naturally I have problems with the nurse practioner being considered an 'advance practice nurse.' In reality they are a doctor's assistant. Our professionalism does not come by being more like a doctor but by being more of a nurse. "
Boy you really hit a note with me.
This is so misguided, so detrimental to our communal nursing image, and so ignorant of nursing history that I had to place this reply.
Doctors did NOT create NPs, they fought their evolution from incipiency, and created Physician Assistants in response LATER in an effort to exert their control by first , the clever use of the name " Physician Assistant' to assure no misunderstanding of that role, and further to diminish the autonomy and evolution over a discipline [NPs]which they saw as threatening their autonomy, control, and economic niche.
PAs have LESS years of dedicated education none of which involves nursing schools and NPs arise EXACTLY from the BSN which is their entry level practice degree. .
NPs come from the radical tradition of forward thinking RNs, and the evolution of the RN to NP in the 70s is not any less important to radical nursing history than the first contraceptive provider in America early in the 20th century [who was jailed for lewd behaviour AND was a nurse] or the first nurses serving Manhattan's teaming poor at the end of the 19th century, and who were the only persons of the medical allied professions seeing them and so gave birth to our Visiting Nurse Associations across America [These VNs could be argured to be the kernel of nursing history leading to the tradition of NP]. I won't even go into the frontier nursing service and how THEY reversed the number one killer of rural women in the 1930s, and so changed the practise of obstretics by obstreticians as a result of their example. .
NPs were conceived of BY nurses, were advocated as a legitimate answer to the underserved BY nurses, and were created in the early 70s BECAUSE of the effort ONLY of nurses, exactly to take care of the underserved, in regional areas and specific populations [ie the native american pop or rural nebraska] where an NP would not put physician income at risk by competing directly.However, so succesful was the experiment, that we now have NPs in areas where there is no physician shortage. This is because they are a GREAT bang for the buck.
Your comments interest me because I have many friends who are NPs, and family members who are NPs, but I have, for 20 years, remained a bedside RN. I have noted that ALL of them, once entering grad school, seem to be indoctrinated with the mantra "you are not just a nurse anymore. You are now an NP". I find this so distasteful, and so dismissive of the tradition from which NPs arose, that I have had many heated arguments with those many friends and family members during their period of academic indoctrination. THEY ARE NURSES. and they must NEVER forget it. They were conceived by us, they were advocated by us, and they exist solely because of us. To dismiss them from our numbers furthers the alienating attitude of the misguided "uppity" NP who was indoctrinated without understanding nursing history, and the efforts of private practice MDs and hospital administrations to refer to the NURSE practitioner as "physician extender" , an effort to further HER from the substantial support of the beleaguered population [RNs] to which hospitals, MDs, the American population and NPs must give a bow for creating. Never has there been better bang for the buck than in NPs.
Better to remind an NP of her roots, than to encourage her, or him, to consider differently, and inaccurately.
vemiliob
90 Posts
Please everybody take in consideration that my opinion comes from a different background of yours. Some people can judge Plato's thread as being 20 year out of time, however it is completely current for my working place.
I'm a RN, BSN, with only ten years in nursing, nevertheless I passed through five different health institutions, one of them related to the equivalent to yours "911", as paramedic, performing home care as well.
It is a popular conviction that physicians "KNOW" and nurses are to perform wiping butts only and to obey physicians' orders.
I almost go mad, every day when patients or their relatives call me "doctor", because they cannot accept a nurse with autonomy.
They say things like; "I guess you will become a doctor very soon".
My answer is always the same: "if I wanted to be a doctor, I would be a doctor... I am a Nurse!
I also go mad when my coworkers limit themselves to obey blindly physician's orders, putting in danger our patients security.
The LPN is a figure created by physicians to work as their helpers also in my country and that is a general belief among doctors and lay people, related to all categories of nursing.
US suffer a tremendous nursing shortage. Statistics for the next ten years talk of about a million nurses deficit. If the nursing status were so bright as many of you pretend to paint, there wouldn't be that shortage.
The British nurses complain about the same subjects we do. I guess we have an international problem related to the nursing issue.
Many of you might have a job in the Paradise but this is not the reality for most of us.
The nursing profession is in danger, if someone denies that demonstrates that he/she is living in a bubble of soap.
We are not doctors, however we are neither doctor's servants nor patients servants.... We are nurses, caregivers, guardians, protectors and whatever you want to add. In addition, for that many special qualities are required.
We are nurses because we are special. Not everyone can be so special. No everyone can be a nurse. Therefore, we should be paid and treated in consequence.
This is the point, some day, hopefully, there is going to be only one category of nurses, meanwhile, we have to defend our profession with sword and fist.