RNGuy12

I find that as a man in nursing, I encounter a lot of sexism from my female coworkers. When I am doing my shift in labor and delivery I'm always called out of my patient's room if one of the nurses wants help with lifting heavy patients or things and instead of helping me lift, they stand and watch as I do the lifting. They make remarks about me being a "male nurse" which I find to be a sexist term. I don't call them female nurses. The unit secretary also makes very sexually suggestive remarks to me constantly. I mean, if I said to her the things she says to me, I would be fired in a heartbeat. I've tried to explain that some of their behavior and phrases are sexist and as such offensive, but my concerns are dismissed. The reason I was told is that, I am a man and men have been sexist against women for years. So I should be able to handle women being themselves. Anyone else run into issues like this?

I'm uncomfortable qualifying certain annoying conversations as being of "female coworkers." Although OP, I understand your sense of alienation when the topic of conversations are about clothes and boyfriends (and I don't mean this to be stereotypical, these were actually subjects from work today). The thing is, I don't view it as a male/female thing. As others have pointed out, not every conversation we encounter in life is going to be what we personally find riveting. I find myself bored and annoyed when one of the doctors talks cars to me. I'm a man, but I'm not especially fascinated by cars. It's really not a gender thing, it's a different interest thing. It's no surprise to me, that as a 22 year old man, you are not interested in the goings on of someone's child. You have different interests. I don't think you purposely intended to be divisive. As a man in a field that is primarily made up of women, I can feel out of the loop so to speak if I happen to be working with others who don't consider their audience (i.e, me). On that same note, socializing is a give and take. Sometimes you gotta tolerate conversation you find inane because odds are there maybe some subject you talk about that someone else may find annoying. I do agree some of the replies are a bit harsh and one in particular came off as more divisive than the OP because it implied that as men we are unwelcome outsiders in the profession. Rather than saying the OP should be tolerable of the "child topics" because people are different and sometimes to endure a dull conversation is part of our social give and take, the poster's message came off as essentially saying "tough, you're in a woman's world and if you don't like it you can leave it."

One of my nursing friends new to the profession recently said that nurses were among the most unpleasant, rude individuals she ever had the displeasure of encountering, and I was disappointed to only be able to argue that that was not true of all nurses, though I think the rude unpleasant nurses are beginning to out number the good hearted nurses. My experience with bullying in the workplace has had to do with belittling, questioning my skills and judgment in front of patients or other healthcare providers, etc. The big thing is that my facility values teamwork above most all else. It's an ingrained concept from hire to orientation to actual work. It's almost a fanatical culture centered on the concept of teamwork. The problem with that is such a culture creates two types of workers: those who are actually team players and those who appear to be team players. I found myself being approached constantly and given "jobs" to do by my colleagues when I was new to the unit. The jobs involved the unpleasant aspects of patient care and when I would state that I was too busy with my own patients or offer to trade tasks I would be scolded for being a poor team player. I wasn't being a team player if I refused to do their jobs for them and I wasn't a team player for attempting to compromise and trade patient care activities because I "needed to learn the job." I was constantly being summoned into the clinical director's office to discuss my lack of team work and how I needed to be a better team player. Eventually, I left that unit and transferred to a new one where the bullying is reduced. There is only 1 bully and everyone complains about how she treats them, but no one reports her unprofessional behavior. I agree with previous advice to document incident reports regarding unprofessional or disruptive behavior, but word the report in a clean, detached and objective manner. This creates a paper trail and provides data to the facilities administration, so that maybe someone higher up will address the issue of bullying. In my opinion the bullying problem persists because of equal parts ineffective management and equal parts silence from the bullied. The disruptive behavior is not reported, so it doesn't get addressed. If everyone who felt victimized by a bully filed incident reports on the issue the administration would have no choice, but to aggressively address the problem.

I've noticed that bullying seems to be more prevalent in the OR than in other areas of nursing where I've worked or observed. And if not bullying, then plain rudeness and disrespect. The perpetrators of such behavior in my facility have been the older, more experienced nurses to new nurses. Many preceptors mistreating their orientees. There is also bullying from techs to nurses and doctors to nurses, but by far it's the older nurses who seem to go out of their way to make new nurses miserable. What's worse is a majority of the time the behavior is passive aggressive or insidious; they use indirect methods to bully and belittle and it makes it difficult for the bullied to report the behavior because the phrase "it's not what they said, it's how they said it" comes up a lot and the bullied nurse is seen as or feels overly insensitive or paranoid.

I'm not surprised that you've heard about surgery what you've heard. It's an area you either love or you hate and you figure it out fast. I started in labor and delivery and I've just completed cross training in the OR and have been circulating on general cases for about 3 months now while floating back up to L&D when I'm needed or we have lack of work in the OR (we're relatively small). I don't think you're limiting yourself by transitioning to OR. You can work in surgery clinics, train to be a RN first assistant, move on up into management, transfer to cath lab, etc. I'll be perfectly honest and say that I'd be stretching the truth if I said I loved it, but to be fair, my facility lacks certain "amenities" such as stable leadership (clinical directors rotate in and out) and the call can be brutal since our circulator staff is small compared to other facilities in the area. For the most part, I enjoy the work. A lot of nurses who don't work in the perioperative setting seem to think that what we do isn't "real" nursing, but that is simply not the case. The perioperative environment insists on the circulator having impeccable critical thinking skills that aid in anticipating needs unique to each case and patient, and that is the heart of nursing. The biggest difference I noticed is that in surgery potential complications drive our interventions more than actual problems (though there certainly are actual problems we address such as anxiety r/t the surgical procedure, etc.) and it's the opposite on the floor - actual problems drive our interventions. Now - I'm going to be perfectly frank, when I first transitioned to the OR I was warned not to do it because a) "surgery people are crazy" or b) "surgery nurses don't like people" and c) surgery nursing isn't real nursing. These were very unfair generalizations. That said though, in my experience, colleagues in the perioperative setting can be less pleasant toward one another than other areas of nursing in which I've worked. I've personally had to report more people for unprofessional behavior in OR than I've ever had to in L&D. This unprofessional behavior ranged from rudeness and yelling to condescending and demeaning comments. I reported one CRNA for telling a patient to "quit whining, there's nothing wrong" when she was waking up. I've been told far more horrific stories by colleagues at other facilities in regard to how OR staff treat one another, but that may not necessarily be something that is universal and as I understand it, many facilities are taking a zero tolerance stance against hostile work environments. It's definitely a different world! Good luck!

I have an ADN and I have been working labor and delivery for the past 5 months and am completing cross training in the OR next week. I've had prior experience in family practice, which I absolutely loved, unfortunately the money in a family practice clinic doesn't compare to what I earn in surgery and labor and delivery. I'm currently evaluating my educational and career plans and need some advice/input. I've wanted to get my MSN and become a family nurse practitioner and return to my first love, but I'm concerned with earning potential and what I'm beginning to perceive as an oversaturation (at least in my area) of NPs. It just seems like you can't swing a cat without hitting some kind of NP or NP owned clinic. I've been looking into alternatives....I'm pretty sure I'm going to get my BSN (though I've considered other degrees such as public health). I guess where I'm waffling is on the higher level degree. I'd love to work with public health policy/education - one of my favorite aspects of family practice and L&D is health promotion and education. I've also considered clinical education in a hospital or working as an instructor at a nursing school. It's been advised to me so far that I should continue with my original plan and become a NP since I could work in clinical practice, teach, or work in public health. I guess the idea is that a MSN with a family practice specialization provides the most flexible career options. What are your experiences and education levels? I'm curious about other nurses' takes on higher education and advancement in the profession. I appreciate any thoughts.

The bill is not the point; it's just an unfortunate part of the situation. The point is my medical chart was accessed by a provider who had nothing to do with my care. I don't feel like that was right or in keeping with HIPAA standards. Can you explain what you mean by depending on how the practice is run?

Unfortunately, that is the situation in Memphis and surrounding areas like North MS. What jobs there are, I can't tell you how many of them I see that require anywhere from 6 months to 3 or 4 years experience - minimum. I'm in a similar boat as my experience is clinic/urgent care and the hospitals that don't just ignore my resume usually e-mail to say I don't have the right experience. The latter statement is especially annoying if the position is in med surg considering that a majority of what RNs end up doing on some if not most med surg floors is passing meds; something we do in clinics so...yeah. There are jobs in the Memphis area, but it seems as though they want you to have all kinds of experience for basic entry level positions, but none of them seem willing to give new grads chances to earn experience. Hospitals like Baptist in the Memphis area get tons of applications so their hiring process tends to be slow cause they have to shuffle through all the applications. I'm told it is easier if you know someone who can give the hiring manager a heads up to be looking for your resume. That at least would increase your chances of getting in front of someone. There are a lot of postings on job sites for positions in nursing homes, hospice, and home health (the latter 2 tend to favor experience).

That does sound a tad odd to me too!

I need some perspective on a situation that occurred recently please! Until recently, I worked in a NP owned clinic. There were 2 NPs in the practice, one of whom is the owner while the other is just employed there. For over a year now, my healthcare has been overseen by the employee NP because I trust her and respect her clinical judgment. I recently put in my notice d/t pay and benefit issues. The day after I put in my notice I had an appt with the employee NP. The next day, the employee NP found me and informed me that our employer called her in for a meeting because she had seen my name on the schedule and subsequently went through my personal medical chart and disagreed with the course of treatment decided between my chosen provider and myself. Citing clinic "protocol" the owner strongly implied it would be in the professional best interest of the employee NP to run expensive lab tests that I couldn't afford d/t never being offered the opportunity to receive the company insurance (one of the deciding factors in my leaving the job). Needless to say, I ended up strong armed into having the tests done and now am being dunned for a large bill. Then later that same day the owner called me in to her office and told me to clock out as my services would not be required for the remainder of my notice period. I'm not concerned over having to leave the job sooner than was originally planned d/t it being a very toxic workplace and the boss being very difficult to work with. What I am having trouble with is that I feel like my privacy was violated because a person who had nothing to do with my healthcare accessed my information and then intimidated my chosen healthcare provider into performing expensive labs she and I had decided that while they would be good to have, were not expressly necessary at the time and could wait until I had better means to pay for them. Does this sound like something I need to address with the Office for Civil Rights?