scared to death!

[Melly0104]

I am a new rn on a progressive care unit. I am scared to death that I am going to make a mistake and end up losing my license. I question everything and sometimes I have caught some mistakes.I have been on orientation since June and will be coming off in Sept. Does anybody else feel like this? I am doing well on orientation but I'm a nervous wreck that I could make a huge mistake.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

Mmm, no. It may take only one truly spectacular mistake, like coming in to work stoned out of your mind, or cleaning out all the morphine from the pyxis before you go for your break, but as I've said before and you will hear over and over from experienced nurses, routine errors such as everyone makes at some time in a career should not be the source of such angst and paranoia. This is crazy-making.

Now, as a matter of fact, it is pretty hard to lose your license to practice, and the next time somebody tells you that it's easy (faculty included-- it's a very pervasive myth), ask them for a citation of an actual case. Legal nurses will tell you (or you can look it up yourself) that only a tiny proportion of alleged malpractice cases ever come to trial, and of those, only about 4% are found for the plaintiff.

This topic comes up all the time.

If i've said it once, I've said it a dozen times.There is entirely too much moaning about "loosing (sic)/losing my license" on AN. I don't know if it's related to the general catastrophizing outlook on life that comes from the daily news and how it's reported ("if it bleeds, it leads"), or a general innumeracy related to actual statistics and risk assessment. Probably a bit of both.

You can go online and find out who suffered loss or restriction of RN license in your state. My state nursing association publishes them in the newsletter; it's maybe dozens per year, but certainly not hundreds or thousands. People lose their licenses for things like substance abuse at work, narcotics diversion, fraud, felony theft, patient abuse, and so forth. If you aren't planning on doing any of that, your risk of license restriction or loss is minuscule. If you've been at work for several months and haven't got the management dropping broad hints about going back to retail, I'd say you probably have very little to be "scared to death" about.

Being "scared to death" is not a functional way to go through life. :) It will serve you especially poorly in your first year of practice. :) Telling yourself you're terrified / scared to death / panic-stricken is something we hear all the time here, but is a poor message to give yourself. Lose those words and their cousins pronto; banish them from your vocabulary and they will never bother you again.

Seriously. If you find your anxiety is truly getting in the way of your ability to function, consider a brief tune-up with a qualified counselor to help you get it under control. A little anxiety is useful, keeps you sharp, and all, but being "scared to death" is beyond useful.