Please Help Persuade!! :)

NurseNora, BSN, RN · Nov 3, 2007

WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF ATTITUDE? Well, that depends on just what attitude you're talking about. It's very important in many different ways. If you go into work expecting a bad day, you'll probably have one no matter what actually occurs. A "know it all attitude" will create friction between you and your coworkers; patients too. A nurse with the attitude that pregnancy and childbirth are normal, healthy life events will have very different outcomes than a nurse who believes that pregnancy and childbirth are dangerous experiences and mother and baby must be protected from the bad things that can happen. The first nurse will be on the lookout and respond if something goes wrong, the second nurse expects that things will go wrong and will have more problems than the first nurse.I used to work with a nurse who while relieving me for a lunch break would raise my patient's blood pressure so much that I several times came back from break to find my perfectly healthy patient on Mag. There was once a research project at a hospital where I worked to see if nurses really did have an effect on the C/S rate. The researcher found that certain nurses had significiantly less sections than other nurses. AS a researcher, she found a way to compensate for variables like the nurse who chooses the patient almost ready to deliver at the beginning of the shift or chooses multips or chooses spontaneous labors over inductions, or pushed epidurals, etc. (I'm not a researcher and don't know how she did this, don't ask me). I was one of the low section rate nurses. The only similiarities she found were that we in the low rate group trusted the process and expected things to go normally.

WHAT IS THE DOCTOR/NURSE RELATIONSHIP LIKE?

It varies. I think that L&D has a closer, more collegial relationship than many other areas. The docs spend more time hanging out in L&D than in many other areas of the hospital. So they get to know the nurses better and vise versa. I'll bet it's similiar in ER and ICU. Most docs like to teach and during those hurry up and wait times they'll often be willing to tell you what's new in the literature, or go into more detail about why they chose to manage some aspect of the patient's care in one way rather than another. I think that surgeons tend to be a little testier than many other specialties and obstetricians are surgeons, but since they work with real miracles all the time, they're a little less likely to confuse themselves with God than some of the other specialties.

POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES OF OB?

Positives: Participating in miracles on a daily basis. There's nothing else like being there when a new person enters the world for the first time and everything is brand new. Fathers that cry at the birth of their child. Watching a baby nurse for the very first time. Less poetic but very satisfying to me is that I never know what I'll find when I get to work. Some nights there's no chance to pee for 12 hours, some nights we sit around and swap "war stories". Then out of the blue someone comes in with a prolapsed cord or bleeding from an abruption and you have to jump into high gear without notice. I like the unpredictibleness of it. I don't like getting to know my patients well. I like it that they come to the hospital with an acute problem, we deal with it and send them on to someone else. That's why I prefer L&D to PP. For the last 4 years I've been working in a combined unit and have been doing couplet care as well as L&D. Although I'll always prefer fetuses to infants, I'm liking the couplet care more than I thought I would. I enjoy teaching and that is a huge aspect of PP care.

Negatives:That's harder for me to think of. I fell in love with OB when I saw my first delivery and haven't done any other kind of nursing for the last 38 years. This is judgemental, but anyone can have a baby. There are people having babies that wouldn't qualify to adopt a kitten from the ASPCA. I get social service and CPS involved when necessary, but there are times I just feel sick sending a baby home with it's parents. I know bad things will happen. It's sad when a baby (or a Mom) dies, it's just not fair, but that's something nurses in any field has to face from time to time; it's not specific to OB.

I worked last night and I'm not positive any of theis makes any sense. I hope it does and that you find it helpful in some way.