klarck

I'm a male bedside nurse who's moving to a home care job at the first of the year (Yay!) I agree with those upthread guessing that the problem lies with the agency. I might add that the agent rep's "warnings" may be coming awfully close to discriminatory hiring practice as well. (Google BFOQ) I've only encountered resistance to care based on my gender once. My assigned pt told me she "has a problem with male nurses" and assessments. I asked her if she had a problem with male doctors and assessments. She thought about it a couple of seconds and we completed the following 12 hour shift together quite amicably. (Funny how physicians run into sex/gender issues less often than RN's, isn't it?) I firmly believe in the principle of pt autonomy. I respect social/cultural mores regarding mixed-sex physical contact. However I do not think the right to choose health care interventions grants the pt the right to discriminate against me based on my sex/gender. At least not in 21st century American society - we're above that.

I haven't contacted our P&P - I'm a new guy on nights and am trying to quietly acculturate to my new institution. Just trying to get a feel for whether this is weird or not.

My first institution gave nurses the option of either "BSN" or "RN" (but not both) on their ID badges. "BSN" may not be big-headed, but it sort of seemed to me that the nurses who chose it over "RN" tended to be. I'm more proud of the work I do than the degree I've earned and that's why I'm Klarck Khent RN.

I just started at a new institution and am a little puzzled by one the the practices on the floor. When an IVPB gtt such as Zosyn or Vanco is written for a pt who's not on IV maintenance fluids/heplocked, the nurses here will connect and run it without setting up a 0.9NS primary. They just put the abx gtt on primary tubing, program the pump and run it (at the correct rate) until the pump alarms IV-complete. My gut reaction is this is not a good thing, but of course that may be because it's new and strange to me. I'm uneasy about it, but can't think of a reason not to do this. Any thoughts?

The suggestion that there's a super-secret imposed ratio in effect could be verified with some simple statistics performed on readily available govt employment and educational data. Hungry, enterprising lawyers are plentiful and if sex discrimination was really going on I think we'd have already seen a class action suit or two on behalf of our female peers. No, there are no more doors open to men than women in nursing. To overextend the metaphor however, men knock tend to knock at the door a bit differently. I think men interview differently and, once hired, play the office/clinical politics game more aggressively than women. Men tend to puff up qualifications at an employment interview more so than women and aren't bashful about talking themselves up. Men jump at serving on committees and changing established working conditions instead of working around limitations. They're more assertive at performance reviews and turn evaluations into two-way negotiations. Broad generalizations, but they tend to explain some of the anecdotes in this thread.

After spending a mere 15 minutes searching my PCCN study guide for the definitive answer, I can assure you the "P" stands for "Progressive". (btw, always -ALWAYS- question acronyms.)

Humor is sometimes generated at the expense of others and sometimes at the expense of the joker himself. Chose the former at your own risk. BTW, If you don't want some of your behavior simply dismissed as due to "too much testosterone", you'd do well to drop the "too much estrogen" crap. Treat your peers as people, not endocrine systems. (I'm a guy)

Here's a timely article in the Journal of Professional nursing. Here's the money line: "The authors found that second-degree students are usually older and more motivated. Because they have more work experience, they have coping advantages over newer, younger nursing graduates during the transition between leaving school and entering the workforce." The evidence seems to indicate that there's some preparation for the working world that nursing school can't provide. Preparation you have already have. It's been my experience that seasoned nurses aren't as impressed by a new grad's clinical chops as much as they are his/her work ethic and willingness to learn. (disclaimer: I'm a 2nd-degree BSN nurse and have been practicing for a year now.)

Yikes, I just got my quick view results from Pearson/NCLEX this morning (I passed) but the MI Public Health website still shows my license number "pending". This seems like just the kind of detail that'll get completely hosed up under a gov't shutdown. I'm supposed to start work the 15th but that's contingent on my licensure.

I'm in a 2nd career program after working on the shop floor as an IE for about 10 years in SoEast Michigan. On my way out, I got very little in the way of gender/poop jokes. I'm assuming it was because all the guys - both bargaining unit and white collar - were keenly aware of two things 1) I'll have a steady job next year, 2) many of them won't.

Go retro. Adidas still makes their all-leather Superstar II and it's available with white stripes. They also still make the Stan Smith, an all white leather tennis court shoe. After a short break-in, they're remarkably comfortable, even by today's standards.

As a 2nd career student with limited health care experience, I've always held a slightly different perception of men in white. If I see a non-uniformed guy in white pants and shirt, I immediately think of the orderlies in "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest". Not exactly exemplary professionals, but definitely bad-axx mofos.

I'm a second-career nursing student. After 20 years in industry - manufacturing, engineering, mba - I can tell you that anyone who begins a sentence with "I didn't get four years of education to..." is automatically labelled a primadona. To be successful in any profession, you have to learn take some crap and do some of the crap jobs. However, in nursing, that's not a just a metaphor.