Pet Peeves

Nurses General Nursing

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What is your pet peeve? With everything a nurse has to deal with in a day, the one thing that gets on my nerves is someone who takes the garbage bag out of the can but doesn't replace the liner. It makes me psycho. How bizarre is that?

Specializes in IMCU/Telemetry.
OMG, the one that drives me up the wall is when someone pages the Dr. then will not answer the phone. So, the phone is ringing off the hook, I answer it and have to go up and down the hall searching for the person who paged them. Meanwhile they are doing a dressing change or starting IV:angryfire

And they don't tell anyonethey placed the call before leaving the desk.

Specializes in IMCU/Telemetry.

A Peeve of mine is the IV tray. When charge on nights, I get to stock it (if the night is quiet). I always find it ripped apart, dividers thrown away, and garbage put back into the tray. a 5 min job is now a 20 min job (making/finding replacement dividers, ect). :angryfire :angryfire

My biggest pet peeves:

1. Wife drinking the last of the milk then putting the empty jug back

in the fridge.

2. Wife using my razor.

3. My wife not answering to my girlfriends' name. :chair:

4. Dog drinking my last beer. :beer:

I love your pet peeves. I got a good laugh. We used to have only one cabinent for pots and pans. I could tell whenever he put the pans away. Sometimes I thought he booby trapped that cabinent just for me. I'd open the door and the pans would fall out on my toes, followed by jumping around and some cusing. After awhile I got smarter and learned to back up before openning that door. LOL

What is your pet peeve? With everything a nurse has to deal with in a day, the one thing that gets on my nerves is someone who takes the garbage bag out of the can but doesn't replace the liner. It makes me psycho. How bizarre is that?

my pet peeve is when I'm working triage people drive up to the door and say they can't get the patient out of the car-----How did they get in the car??

Lack of common sense.

Dirty rooms

Rooms with enough linnens in them to stock the whole floor

Old food sitting around on tray tables.

The diry beds cover up thing.....got a stain...just throw a sheet or pad over it.

Smelly trash cans.

By biggest.....poor colostomy care.

--Walking into a room to find 2 boxes of large gloves, 3 boxes of medium gloves, and a nice big EMPTY box of smalls. :)

How about walking into a room and only having small gloves. That doesn't work for us guys. It seems that those who stock gloves think that everyone's hands are their size.

1. no small gloves

2. housekeeping will clean the room, but when you get a new pt and go to attach them to the monitor, pulse ox, etc. there's dried blood on the cables.

3. no thermometers anywhere, and when you do find one, they're no probe covers

4. pt comes back to room from a test, you hook them all back up, IVF running, BP cuff on, etc etc and right before you leave the room they ask to get up and use the bathroom. grrr.

5. nurses who take a gazillion smoke breaks during their shift, so they're not around when they get a new pt, and someone else ends up working up the pt. for them

6. charge nurses who haven't had an assignment in so long they think it's fine to hit you with 3 new total care/critically ill patients back-to-back (as they then saunter outside for a cigarette). Sure, I can be in 3 places at once to assess/clean up/get line and labs/EKG/medicate/chart on 3 new patients all at the SAME TIME :uhoh3:

Specializes in 5 yrs OR, ASU Pre-Op 2 yr. ER.
2. housekeeping will clean the room, but when you get a new pt and go to attach them to the monitor, pulse ox, etc. there's dried blood on the cables.

Our housekeepers aren't allowed to clean monitoring machines and cables.

my pet peeve is when I'm working triage people drive up to the door and say they can't get the patient out of the car-----How did they get in the car??

LOL- I work with medical clinics. I have pt.'s calling insisting that the clinic has to send out an ambulance for them, because they are "too weak to walk to a car or taxi". When I tell them that it's going to cost them up to $1000 for a non urgent ambulance to come get them--all of a sudden they get cured. It's amazing how they instantly get better and decide they don't need to see a dr. after all. Or, somehow they'll some how manage to get a friend to take them for a clinic appointment.

My other pet peeve occurred last night. A doc left instructions with his patient to call the nurses , and that we would look up the lab work and tell the patient , whether to start or stop his meds. I had to tell the patient that this was outside our scope practice. I had to send a "nasty gram" to the doc and let him know that he was responsible for looking up his patient's lab work and providing instructions--not me.

Other units that "borrow" equipment such as our doppler, and never return it or pick apart our new equipment "shopping" for parts.

Ditto on the patient you spend 15-20 minutes on getting comfy and then they tell you they have to go to the BR.

2. housekeeping will clean the room, but when you get a new pt and go to attach them to the monitor, pulse ox, etc. there's dried blood on the cables.

Our housekeepers aren't allowed to clean monitoring machines and cables.

When a patient has been discharged, housekeepers don't strip the bed, and they seem to relish copping a hostile attitude towards the nearest RN specifically (NEVER the CNAs), irregardless of how busy (ie: your on the phone with the doc over an unstable patient), over this task that takes less than 1 minute to do. The big pet peeve here: overhearing them bragging amongst each other on their break about how they all "tell off" the "LAZY & INCONSIDERATE" nurses.

Ok, will have to look into my hospital's policy on cleaning the cables. At my old hospital they did clean them...and I'm by no means knocking our housekeepers. I just hate seeing that dried blood after the room's been cleaned, regardless of who did the cleaning.

biggest peeve.....no follow thru. Nursing is 24/7. I can leave one weekend and come back in next weekend and the same issues are still sitting around.

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