Sisukas

The job of some nurses in our hospital is to do Quality Assurance for reimbursement...sounds as is that's what the OP does.

please, please, for the love of pete....spit out your gum!!!!!! if i want to hear snap, crackle and pop in the morning, i'll eat rice krispies. i literally could not continue my day until that was off my chest....

A nursing supervisor pronouncing a DNR patient deceased walked out of the room, shut the door, and told me in her best Munchkin voice, "not only is he truly dead, he's really most indubitably dead".

i blamed one on a dead person once:eek:....turned him on his side to wrap him, and either the pca or mr. gonetogreaterthings let one loose. since mr. g probably wasn't going to be embarrassed, i gave him the credit.

time to get one of your advanced practice nurses or a nurse educator involved. it sounds as if she has some fear/trust issues and i'm afraid that she will go to your point of view, miss something, and kick herself until next year....you need some back up and you need it now. if her facility is like mine, she will not have 30 weeks of orientation in order to get comfortable with 5 patients.

I wasn't implying that the CNA was expected to work off the clock. I was saying that the CNA is working to help the patient, and trying not to say that I didn't care for the attitude I read in that post.

"i beg to differ. even if one is not on the clock and the person in the bathroom was ok, the cna should have at least helped or found other help for the rn. that is why they are called "nursing assistants" to help the nurse. " they are called nursing assistants because they assist the patient, in my opinion. they are not there to assist me and they do not work for me. they work for the patient, as do i.

"It's fun until someone loses an eye. Then...Hey! Free eyeball!"

glad you've made the choice for nursing:yeah: i'm curious about your decision to be a surgical nurse, though. not that i think it's a bad, thing; god love them for doing what they do because that means i don't have to do it. it only took one observation day to confirm that this was not my field. anyway, i'm surprised you aren't looking into peds since you love kids. my advice? choose a field after you've had clinical experience in all of them. it would not be good to commit to one and base your education on it, only to find that you prefer your patients awake and talking to you.

another thought...do you have benefits through your retirement that would allow your wife to work per-diem? my husband carries full insurance through his job, which allows me to work pd, which really raised my salary. and with the shortage, i don't get called off, ever. [color=#483d8b]i supported our family by myself as a new grad, by the way, for almost a year while my husband took time off to recover from his stressful job/commute in yosemite, and not only did we survive, we saved a down payment for a house. it is doable.

yeah, i had warned her....we just underestimated how well that would work. she got the chicken ceasar salad for lunch...one of the few hospital foods that's made to order. i do treat my pcas well; and am very mindful of how their days go. i also make every new nurse that i orient spend a couple days with the pca if she wasn't an extern. i was a cna a while ago, but i haven't forgotten how it is. that's probably why she felt comfortable telling me off in the hall.

well, this was not one of my most shining moments.......my patient had not had a bowel movement for about 6 days, best as i could figure from our i&os and the snf records of from whence he came. being the proactive yet lazy new nurse that i was, i figured he need to get goin' but i didn't feel like calling the md for a laxative. my plan? warm prune juice via g-tube. why not?...we give it p.o. when there's no other options at the moment.... about a half hour later, i'm thinking about going down to the room to see if my plan worked. suddenly i see my pca barreling down the hall with an armful of linen and a really stressed look on her face. i stopped in my tracks, looked at her....she looked at me....and said.. "don't even think about going in that room. don't help me, don't talk to me, don't look at me". somebody please tell me they've done something similar.

Don't assume that not having a bowel movement for 4 weeks is a normal part of pregnancy.

1. when you check the med sheets at night,if a med isn't on the pre-printed sheets, pharmacy isn't aware of the order. if you have to write it, fax it. 2. the chair is not on wheels so you can toodle around the nurses' station. get up off it, walk to the pyxis, and yes, i was using the top of my foot when you ran it over. 3. when you wake up a doc at 2 am for an imodium order, for the love of pete, give the drug. when the doc you woke up comes in to the station hollering at me because you woke him up and then didn't give the med, and requests your phone number so he can wake you up to ask why you didn't give it.....i will give it to him with a smile.

"what's the magic word?"

as a clinical instructor for a 12 hour/day rotation...my group does not attend report. why? there's not enough room/chairs at the nurses' station; the majority of the rns are uncomfortable taking report with a bunch of white uniforms standing and/or fidgeting beside them; i never have to worry about a student interrupting report to ask questions that can wait. the students meet with me at 0645, eat breakfast and get their assignments, and report to the floor at 0720. on the floor that i do clinicals, the nurses seldom get out to the patients until 0800, after looking up labs, checking their meds, and updating the pcas after the pcas do walking rounds with night shift, so they give a quick report to the student who is following them that day (the student works with the rn all day and is assigned to all of his/her patients) and off they go. this makes a much nicer start to the morning than when they used to come in for report. if a patient is going bad, the student goes to the room with the rn, with or without report, and stands in the corner that i tell her to stand in and watches everything. doesn't participate, just watches and asks questions/debriefs later.

let me just throw another thought out there...if there were no nurses to care for patients during strikes, how would that affect a strike vote? when we had a strike in our area, i started wondering that for myself; (even though i wasn't part of the striking hospital). i concluded that having the travelling nurses as back up would make me more likely to vote to strike. leaving the patients in the care of management nurses only was a personal line that i couldn't cross.

"I don't want to work...I want to bang on the drum all day....I don't want to play...I just want to bang on the drum all day...." Todd Rundgren.

To the custody patient who drove drunk with a BS higher than 300 and didn't want that cuff on his leg..."I'm sure your friend who's taking the dirt nap right now wouldn't be complaining about a cuff on his leg". Okay, I did say it. What I wanted to say was.."you whiny little ...."

I know you'll remember these shifts when you're delegating to your aide in the future.....The best lesson I learned in nursing school? "The CNA's will love you when you put a patient on a bedpan; they'll kill for you when you take the patient off".

i avoid drinking fountains at all costs.....have been busted by my husband for staring at his cousin's veins over thanksgiving dinner....and often tell the pending heart attack guy at our local hockey games that i'm off duty so he'd better settle down.

My concern for you is that you're cheating yourself. You're young, you should be out responsibly having a good time. Here's what I've learned....you can have a great time with your friends without drinking and with getting in early. My husband is in a rock band who gigs every other weekend, and I go to those gigs whether I'm off the next day or not, because hearing him sing for a couple of hours while nursing one drink sure as heck beats sitting at home and wishing I was there. My husband and my friends know I'm out of there early when I have to work the next day. I'm more than twice your age, and a grandma to boot, and I pull it off; you can too, and it will help you be a very entertaing nurse when you show up at work with stories to tell about all the drunk people making fools of themselves the night before. Seriously though. Work with management on that holiday schedule, make sure you get your time off fairly, and keep hanging with your friends. It's worth an hour or two of your sleep once in a while.

I agree. I will tell the person who brought the situation up to me that corrective action has been taken, but if they ask for specifics on the discipline, I tell him/her that that isn't something I can share.

"You're (re)covered well here."

I agree with everything up to half of number 5. If you are not a supervisor, you shouldn't tell the supervisor how to correct the problem. This puts you dangerously close to showing the same attitude that you are complaining about. And you are right to expect feedback, but expect to see it in action, don't expect the supervisor to tell you how she disciplined the employee. That's not your business. Ideally, you'll see results of your write-up visible as improvement of attitude.