Please bear with me while I try to explain my dilemma.
I'm an RN student, doing rotations in a large hospital. I've rotated off and on a med/surg unit over the past few weeks. There is a nurse (Nurse R) on the unit that has been assigned as a preceptor (of sorts) for the students while we are there.
Here's my "issue." Nurse R seems a bit psychotic. During report she makes comments (judgements really) about the patients social situations. Some of the remarks are based on ethnicity, some are about class, stupidity, being sleezy, being an annoying patient... you get the idea.
She is projecting an attitude of that care (or lack of) is based on if SHE thinks the patient is deserving. Poor patients that make bad choices in life, lower class people, needy elderly, obese, minorities, certain ethnic groups are put into her category of "bad" patients. Bad patients don't deserve the same level of care as good patients. She even goes so far as to look up history (including social work reports, financial information, etc.) on patients she is not assigned to take care of "just in case." She gossips in a way that is mind boggling. I've actually had to just get up and leave the area. I feel sick to my stomach sometimes when she starts a rant about a patient.
Am I naive? Is this normal? I heard the other nurses doing it to a minor degree, but nothing anything near this level. Maybe the everyone does it, maybe I just don't hear them. This nurse talks badly about patients in front of other nurses in the med room, the break room, at the desk -- EVERYWHERE!!! I am mortified. I want to crawl under a rock.
I guess what I'm trying to say is ... what do I do .. as a student when my preceptor seems borderline psychotic and is behaving in morally and ethically inappropriate way? Talk to someone at my school? Talk to someone at the hospital? Write up an anonymous comment and send it to HR a few weeks from now. Oh and she's not new. She's been a nurse at this facility for 10+ years. Please don't tell me this is the reality of nursing in a big hospital. I'll just quit now.