Let me pre-face this that I am asking this from a genuine place - I am not looking to putdown ortho nurses in any way because in fact I hope to be one! However, I guess the message I have gotten thru school and from professors and such is that Med Surg nursing is a "stepping stone" a "great place to start" and "a place to hone your skills"....thus, the under-lying message is that Med-Surg, and especially ortho since it is often dealing with post-surgical bone stuff, is for "beginners" or, worse, for nurses who weren't quite "good enough" to handle ICU, NICU, or ED.
AGAIN - this is the message I have gotten from others, and it is NOT what I am trying to say is my POV. I guess I am looking for reassurance against this wave of opinion though. Yes, I know I shouldn't care, but it has bothered me - more than I care to admit.
I guess if I keep hearing "it's a good place to start", it's almost as if they're saying, "you won't want to stay once you've got your skills and experience"...like it's not good enough, or something.
I think each of us have a place and not one is more prestigious when it comes to floor nursing than another. They are all difficult in their own right... except ortho. I did almost 8 years of med-surg and covid wrecked it. We didn't have enough room in our ICU's and PCU's for the critical and dying patients so they kept getting shunted to Med-Surg, except we still have the same 5 patient max ratio until people started quitting, and then it went up to 6 patients apiece and charge taking patients so you had NO ONE to help when you were drowning. I am in ortho now and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to Med-Surg. I work with a former PCU nurse that had the same mentality as you when she was an ortho tech at the hospital I work at. She wanted something more exciting and prestigious, but she ended up at PCU taking care of ICU patients with PCU ratios and sometimes short staffed. She's now back at ortho after doing her time. Sometimes predictable and easy is nice.
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amoLucia
7,736 Posts
This older post made me laugh, and then I shook my head!' No other specialty has been 'dumbed down' more than Long Term Care.
So sad that still in this day & age, nurses are denigrating other nurses' professionalism.
And then we expect others, like employers, to show us the respect we all deserve.