Seriously? A hospital is NOT a hotel.

[raianne]

So I work on a surgical oncology floor. We generally don't get medicine patients unless all the medicine floors are full. Last night we get a call that we're getting a patient...we're confused, because our floor was pretty empty, but so were all the other floors. This woman and her friend show up, SUPER LOUD at 3am, rowdy, laughing, talking, waking the other patients up. We find out that they were on a medicine floor but they weren't in a private room, and they made a big deal about it (although come to think of it, I do feel bad for whoever their roommate was) and complained that they wanted a private room so the AOD put them on our floor.

Really? I mean, I know they do customer satisfaction surveys now, but that seems a little ridiculous to me. And then to make things even more awesome, her nurse thought that the patient was pretending to take her pain meds but slipping them to her friend...AFTER they had been in her mouth and she acted like she swallowed them. What can you do about that, (without offending an already loud and entitled-acting patient) short of "lift up your tongue, say AHHH, let me make sure you swallowed your pills"? Sigh. My floor can be busy and hectic but our patients are generally a great bunch of people and it makes me happy that I don't have to deal with patients like this on a daily basis.

[NurseLeader12]

Wooh, to respond to your comment, I worked at the bedside for five years until January of this year (both in the emergency setting and in Labor & Delivery) before moving into my current position. I still staff occassionally to keep up my clinical skills and so that I can understand the challenges of our bedside nurses. I've always worked with challenging populations - uninsured/underinsured, patients from difficult social backgrounds, less than half of my patients speaking English, high levels of non-compliance, huge patient volumes with low staffing levels, etc. I promise I get it... Nurses are asked to wear many hats and balance many demands. However, it is possible to provide exceptional patient care AND go the extra mile. Time management, teamwork, and a little bit of compassion go a long way.

Think back to your days as a nursing student/new grad. Would you still have pursued this career if you knew you'd end up feeling this way about nursing/patients? It's up to you to choose your outlook on our profession... Nobody said it'd be easy, but it's a pretty special calling if you ask me.

[rn/writer, RN]

I promise I get it... Nurses are asked to wear many hats and balance many demands. However, it is possible to provide exceptional patient care AND go the extra mile. Time management, teamwork, and a little bit of compassion go a long way.

Think back to your days as a nursing student/new grad. Would you still have pursued this career if you knew you'd end up feeling this way about nursing/patients? It's up to you to choose your outlook on our profession... Nobody said it'd be easy, but it's a pretty special calling if you ask me.

Words fail me. Almost.

This sounds like a rah, rah recruiting poster for a big bucks nursing school. Time management, teamwork and compassion. What a special calling.

I don't mean this personally, but you do not seem to be hearing some of the people in this thread very clearly. Time management is great--as long as it's somewhere in the realm of realistic. When the big bosses want the work of two or three nurses done by a single employee, there is no time stretcher big enough to make that happen.

That's where teamwork comes in, you say? Lovely, except the all of the other team members are similarly strapped and the only thing the higher ups do is provide meaningless "cheerleading" and mandatory training sessions that take another chunk out of the already too-short day.

A bit of compassion? It's hard to have compassion for users and abusers who know the system and milk it bone dry and then complain that the supply ran out. It's even tougher when you know that the ones who genuinely needed a little bit of TLC and a snack and an extra blanket won't be getting those things because a few ill-mannered, inconsiderate sponges soaked up everything and looked around for more. For the rest, the ones who could have benefited greatly from our attention and supplies, sometimes all we have left is compassion and it hurts us that it's not enough.

"Nobody said it would be easy." And nobody said it would be a kick in the pants on some days and a kick in the head on others.

" . . . but it's a pretty special calling if you ask me." There is nothing "special" about being caught in a squeeze play between corporate enforcers and patients and visitors who know how to play the system. It isn't fun. It isn't fair--to the staff or to the other patients.

This is NOT about people dragging their heels because they resent having to provide customer service. It's about inadequate staffing that sometimes makes nurses choose between customer service and proper health care--and punishes them no matter which choice they make. It's about people who only know how to demand and complain and make messes for others to clean up. It's about other nurses who scold and judge and offer "time management and teamwork" as easy-to-say magic solutions when every nurse on a particular floor is already in the habit of running ragged till he or she can't run anymore.

I am so lucky that I no longer work in this kind of environment. My unit has pretty decent staffing, and there are some limits to how far we'll go to meet ridiculous demands. But I wholeheartedly sympathize with my compatriots who would like nothing more than to have a few minutes to warm up a cup of soup for one scared patient and get a pair of slippers for another.

It really bites when people offer canned solutions that imply the frustrated nurses just aren't trying hard enough.