SdntNurse

That is our instructor now too. She seems just as worried about "rocking the boat". All it takes is the staff to hold a meeting and ultimately say whether or not the instructor or even the group as a whole can come back. This very group of nurses did just that to our last instructor for this class. She explained to a physician that the staff nurse was not the one taking care of the patient that day, that it was the student. The physician asked the staff nurse about the progress of a patient, the nurse didn't know what to say and our instructor chimed in and said to ask the student because the nurse hadn't been in the room once. Sticking up for us cost her the job. She is no longer allowed to be an instructor at that site. Majority rules and if the majority is all one of the same, it is a losing battle for everyone else. We have recently just started to find a corner and just stay there as much as possible now. If we see them coming, we are literally rushing to hide somewhere. We figure out what we need to do, look at the orders, run their shifts, do their documentation and hope they stay sitting at that front desk all day like they have been. I do not mind doing the work, I enjoy it I really do. When they are not around, I feel good about being a nurse and I feel confident and productive. If we have a question, We wait until one of the two amazing nurses come around.

Ashley, On the current unit we are working on, we have been on the shift with the same 9 nurses. Only 2 of which sound like yourself (and by the way THANK YOU for being one of those amazing nurses), the other 7 however, do not do their vitals or pass their medication or even do rounds to check on their patients when we are there. They sit at the nurses station almost the entire shift aside from MAYBE one visit to their pt's rooms. We do their rounds and we report the information back to them. This is the first unit I have seen that is this bad. My comment about saving them time, applies directly to the current unit we are on. How can they be so rude and see us as so inadequate but yet find us capable enough to run their rounds? Usually, if we have the same amount of nurses on other units, the ratio is opposite and we find about 2 nurses we quickly learn to stay far away from. But this unit is the worst I have ever seen. At other units, it has been easy to just look past the 1-2 maybe 3 nurses that treat us as an inconvenience, but with this unit, we can't get away from it. Giving them the information they want us to get during rounds is nerve racking enough so we never ask questions so we are learning nothing from them. Our instructor for this class responds with things like "maybe they are just having a bad day" or "did you do something wrong to the nurse?" and it doesn't help us. de2013, I do stand by my decision to not give her the information. When you are confronted by someone with such a bad attitude who has directly shown strong dislike to the fact that you are even in the same room with them, you aren't going to approach them as it is. There was no way I was going to help her. I know that personality and all it would have done was make her defensive by saying "I do have the vitals." One student "corrected" another nurse on this floor with the same attitude a few weeks ago by telling her that she did in fact pass the meds this nurse was accusing her of not passing which the student had documented half an hour earlier. The staff nurse responded with "if you were anywhere close to a decent nurse you would have told me." She said this to the student in front of the patient. The student told her twice that she had administered the meds prior to the nurse accusing her of not doing it. In turn, she was treated worse for the remainder of the shift, which was another 9 hours. Had the vitals been in anyway abnormal, my decision would have been different. However, considering they were in limits, I was not going to risk getting personally attacked for doing what I was supposed to be doing. Mean people are found everywhere and I understand that we run across people like that every day. However, being in a professional setting where we are directly caring for the lives of so many patients on any given day, it shouldn't be acceptable. What if the nurse didn't check the documentation and instead, continued to hold this attitude and administer the same meds again to the patient? Not to mention she completely destroyed any rapport the student had with patient by doing what she did in front of the patient. The majority of the nurses on this unit, aside from the 2 that we absolutely love, have all shown similar behavior. I don't understand how this behavior could be so openly accepted on a unit. We as an entire group dread going to clinical now. We spend 12 hours walking on egg shells, trying to overlook the things they say to us or about us when we are right in front of them every clinical here. Some of us even question our ability to even be a nurse because of them. We know we are competent but being talked down to like that all day makes a lot of us question our own abilities. It is just so frustrating. =/

I am having such a hard time with dealing with some of the attitudes of some of the RN's on staff at some clinical sites. I do not understand how nurses who have been through the same thing we have been through, can be just so unbelievably rude to students on the floor. I keep saying to myself "They used to be students too!" Today for example, our instructor went over a head to toe assessment on a newborn. There was this awful RN that came into the room a few minutes after our instructor left. She started complaining about how the students the instructor "pulled at the baby for 20 minutes and couldn't even give the vitals they recorded?" Another student and I were standing right behind her. We have had a few run in's with this nurse throughout our L&D class. She has ALWAYS been just so rude. I had the newborn's vitals written down waiting for her to come in so I could tell her. After that comment, there was no way I was going to help her do her job. It is like a fight between the staff and the students these days. They don't want us there yet, we are the ones that save them so much time by doing the rounds to take care of vitals, med administration, and comfort measures. Some of the RN staff nurses we have ran into will just flat out ignore us if we ask them a question. Some have gone so far as to intentionally knock into us walking down the hallway. We have even seen a few incidences where the staff RN's will be sitting behind the nurses station in groups talking about the students and even so far as to the way their hair looks or if they are fat. HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE NURSES?!?! I am not understanding how people like this still have a job. We are taught to accept people and you have to in order to help them. You are SUPPOSED to have compassion and empathy and certainly be considerate of other people. These are all aspects of being a nurse. I have been making mental notes on what kind of nurse I will never be thanks to them. How do you deal with this kind of behavior? Our class and everyone in it has been nothing short of considerate, polite, and professional. Even when they act like this. But how do you go about handling something like this without jeopardizing your own future? We have spoken up once and we ended up losing the clinical site for our school by doing so because the chief nurse was just as bad as the rest of them. So now, we just do not say anything. Do not get me wrong, we run across some amazing nurses that are really helpful and we learn so much from them but the bad ones seem to outweigh the good ones. I just do not understand how someone like these nurses could manage to still have a job by acting this way. Is this what I have to look forward to when I graduate? At the very least, I can guarantee that when I do graduate, I will never treat onsite students this way.