"Seasoned Nurses will eat their young"

[taydian]

Probably a recurring question on here............but...........

Is this still generally true?

Have any of you seasoned nurses treated new nurses badly?

I heard about this often, but I, nor other nurses I know who have graduated within the past 5 years, have experienced this issue. The many seasoned nurses I have worked with never treated me in any way where I felt inferior or ever tried to intimidate me.

Before I started working at my new job, I told my kids' school nurse where I was going to be working and she was like, "Oh wow. Good luck to you there. They treated me terribly. They were the types of nurses who ate their young (but this was nearly 15 years ago)"

But these nurses I work with currently are WONDERFUL. And so were the seasoned nurses at my previous job. I am the baby of the unit, age wise and experience wise and they treat me as if I were their equal (they do offer guidance and help when it seems I need it or if I ask for it).

I, personally, haven't encountered any other new nurses who have complaints about being treated with inferiority by experienced nurses.

So have things changed? Have seasoned nurses become more "tolerant" and/or "nicer"..... Or have we just been lucky?

[monkeybug]

I did nursing school in Boston, and the nurses at 2 of my clinical assignments were flat-out hostile toward students. One clinical instructor actually told us to go to her, not the floor nurses, if we had any questions. CNAs and techs were usually pretty friendly, and helped us out a lot. Maybe it was because we made their jobs easier, while the nurses saw us as obstacles.

I've been a nurse for 5 years now,and I like precepting newbies, but I wish more schools used the 1-to-1 preceptor model for clinicals. It's really not the staff nurse's job to teach students, and many of them aren't good at it.

I don't know if it's done this way every where, but preceptorship is only the last semester here for our 4 local nursing schools. And while I love to precept senior nursing students and new grad nurses, the herd of clinical groups is aggravating usually and is usually an obstacle. The instructors are often the issue, because in a lot of cases around here, they have NO obstetric experience but they are doing obstetric clinicals. They have no idea what's going on, and it can cause issues. Not to totally excuse the students, though. Try to find a place to chart, and there are 4 or 5 of them at the desk going over their care plans or studying. Try to eat lunch and there's 4 or 5 of them in the break room taking up precious space. Do a C-section and the instructor can't understand why 3 of them can't go to watch. Why? Because the room is not that big, and as circulator I have a crap ton of other things I'm responsible for, so I'm not usually in the mood to dress out 3 students and then watch them like hawks around my sterile field. Especially when they all troop out when the last staple goes in, instead of staying and helping move the patient. No, it's not glamorous or interesting, but it would certainly be nice repayment for me taking up so much of my time. And I'll never forget when I was breastfeeding my child and pumping at work. 3 different clinical groups busted in on me in our locker room while I was pumping, and all I got when I protested was a "we're all girls!"

I never treated the students any way but kindly, even when I was grinding my teeth over something they said or did, because I remember being a student and being treated like dirt by staff nurses. But I also remember ALWAYS standing and giving my chair to any nurse that came into the station. And if a staff nurse did actually come to us and offer to let us do a Foley or IV, I never, ever, ever would have dreamed of saying (as was said to me) "Oh, I'm a BSN student, I'm going to be a manager, I don't need to know all of that stuff." As I had graduated from the school that little twit was attending, a small part of me died inside of embarrassment to hear that. And when I recovered I reported her to her instructor.