Time to don the fireproof underwear. It is 0500 and the reality alarm clock is ringing, and some people do not like to hear it go off. So whether you agree with me or not, I feel it is time to inject a little thought provoking ideas into your life.
I am sure I am about to get flamed for posting this, but I feel the need to anyways. I have been seeing these threads talking about bullying and teachers or preceptors hating the students, and new nurses or abusing them because of some perceived slight or injustice. Well guess what?
The world is a hard cold nasty place that does not need to be polite to you or worry whether your feelings got hurt and you feel offended. You need to grow up and realize that the abuse that you claim is rampant, or the bullying that you experience all the time is not their problem, but rather your problem.
I see so many posts about this and I wonder how some of these people have survived as long as they have. School is tough? Deal with it. You think that someone else is getting it easier? Well too bad, they may be but no one ever promised you everything would be fair. You have to learn that there is inequality in life. It's how you overcome that inequality that matters. It teaches perseverance.
Abusive teachers? Maybe they are trying to get the best in you to come out. What you think is abuse maybe is pushing you to your limits, to get you further along in your potential. So your feelings got hurt at school, grow up, feelings get hurt every day.
Your preceptor is unorganized and does not like you and bad mouths you to your manager, and all your patients love you but no one at the hospital sees how great you really are?
Well your preceptor may actually have great time management skill, but when having to slow down and teach someone their job, things do tend to get disorganized. You may be part of the blame there.
Did you ever stop to think that you are the proverbial monkey wrench in a well oiled machine? The need to teach you, and I realize you do need to learn, can be very time consuming. They may tell your manager that you need improving or that you are not advancing fast enough. They may be all smiles to you, because they want to support you and keep you positive, but they need to tell the manager how you really are.
Speaking of orientation, how often have I seen statements that say the other nurses are not supportive and will not answer questions. Have you ever thought that maybe you are asking TOO MANY questions?
After a bit it may seem that you are not retaining the info provided and everyone gets tired of answering the same questions over and over. Part of learning is knowing when to shut your mouth and just watch. It has been said by people wiser than me that the only question you should ask is the question that you already know the answer to. If that does not make sense to you, think about it for a while and you might just be surprised that a light comes on.
So basically what i am saying is grow up and act like the adult that you are. Life is not fair, school is not fair, work is not fair. You just have to learn to deal with it.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
On the upside of not being invited to her wedding, you didn't have to buy her a wedding gift! Seriously, that must have been a difficult time; it showed a great deal of personal strength for you to be able to kep your chin up and go back every day. I think the minute someone had laid hands on me, we would have had a "Come to Jesus" meeting.
There were plenty of upsides ! Long time ago. I had just left my abusive husband and was not yet a fully functioning mentally healthy adult!
"The only question you should ask is the one you know the answer to" ??!
Ok, I'm not gonna ask what you meant by that... !
YES! My goodness.
Considering most questions a new nurse asks are procedural and based on facility policy and institution culture, WHY should they know the answer before they ask? "I better not ask my preceptor where the lab is so I can deliver this stat ABG for our patient that is crumping and the doctor who drew the lab is handing it to me trusting it will be resulted urgently and not sit in a lab basket or lost in a pneumonic tube for hours or days. " I personally had this experience. I was brushed off by my preceptor who acted indifferent but in truth didn't know the answer because he had not encountered the situation before. Rather than acknowledge that and help me, he told me that "transport will pick it up" which meant sticking it in a basket that already contained a days worth of specimens. So I called the hospital operator, was told the location of the lab, brought the sample myself, and was given an on the spot print out. My preceptor was completely indifferent to the situation, was not remotely impressed, and told frankly that it was not a nurse's job to bring bloods to the lab. But guess what? It's also not transport's job to see that urgent labs get sent quickly (this was part of that institution's culture) The 7 following years that I worked in that facility, this was my procedure for obtaining quick ABG results for unstable patients. I learned it on my own and was scolded by my preceptor for it.
If you ask and they are mean--most often that means they don't know the answer
I try to avoid complaining about you personally. It's not all about you, and I've never met you. So once again, you fail to realize the point of MY post. I don't have a bias against "the younger generation" -- just against those members of it who behave like entitled special snowflakes ("I'm to special to adjust to NIGHT shift" or "I can't work weekends because it DESTROYS my social life" or "You are owed a nice preceptor who loves to teach," etc.) or who are more interested in perpetual victimhood than in growing up.
Perhaps because we didn't have the internet so we could all sit at home in our pajamas and complain about the older generation, we didn't do much (if any) complaining about the older generation. Truly, my fellow newbies and I idolized those nurses -- even when, as I said, we were no where near the hospital but were sitting around drinking and eating. I'm not putting myself or my generation on a pedestal -- that's how I remember it, and just to be sure I wasn't whitewashing my memories, I dug out my journal from my first year of nursing. There was lots of sturm and drang -- much of it about how we were sure we were never going to be smart enough or skilled enough and about the nurses who were just a year or two ahead of me and acted SO superior. But not about the crusty old bats.
And as a point of fact, I HAVE felt bullied. Not when I was brand new, but at a later job. That nurse actually shoved me across a room and into the overbed table, and the bruises lasted for weeks. She invited everyone on the unit (except me) to her wedding -- all those pale blue invitations in the mailboxes of everyone at work (including brand new staff), but not in mine. At a work party held at someone's house, she pushed me down the front stairs, telling me I wasn't welcome. She lied to the manager about me having turned up a morphine drip with the stated intention of "getting this over with so the family can go home" -- when it was another nurse who had done so. And then she lied to the manager, saying I had done other things that the other nurse -- who was eventually let go when it was discovered that she was shooting up at work -- had done. As you can probably guess, that nurse wasn't the most astute. She was the assistant manager; I was the new hire. Who do you think the manager believed? Eventually, the manager stepped down and one of our colleagues (who knew me pretty well) got the manager's job, and Andrea had to leave me alone. I stood up for myself, and I stayed with the job because I wasn't going to let someone for whom I had so little respect drum me out of a job. And it was worth it. I had a great working relationship with the new manager and enjoyed that job for a dozen years after the new manager pulled Andrea's teeth. Every once in awhile, Andrea would step out of line -- once she told a patient (in front of me) that she had slept with my husband. I have NO idea why she'd do something like that, but I was embarassed and humiliated in front of the patient. I just had to consider the source, though.
Shoving someone, pushing them down the stairs, lying about narcotics and blaming me for the antics of a nurse who was hopped up on heroin -- that's a bit more like true bullying than most of the complaints about bullying we see these days. I'm not saying bullying doesn't exist. I know it does. I'm saying that newbies today have a shockingly low threshold for crying "bully" or "NETY" and a shockingly HIGH threshold for taking responsibility for anything.
I haven't been fortunate enough to have had a child of my own to raise, but if I had, I would have raised him or her a lot differently than some of today's young nurses have been raised. You can blame my generation for how they raised their children, but I personally had nothing to do with it.
Here is what I continue to fail to understand--It is 100% obvious that Andrea has some significant psych/social problems that she chooses to bring to the workplace. And infect the entire unit with this foolishness. And bring it to a physical level, a slanderous level. And even when the new manager came along, knew the history, this behavior continued. Andrea was apparently reprimanded, but still this woman continued to have a job?
Instead, manager's focuses seem to be on finding ways to make it difficult for multi-year nurses to keep their jobs, but let this type of over the top behavior maybe not go un-noticed, but certainly no one is losing their positions over this kind of stuff.
Here is what I continue to fail to understand--It is 100% obvious that Andrea has some significant psych/social problems that she chooses to bring to the workplace. And infect the entire unit with this foolishness. And bring it to a physical level, a slanderous level. And even when the new manager came along, knew the history, this behavior continued. Andrea was apparently reprimanded, but still this woman continued to have a job?
Instead, manager's focuses seem to be on finding ways to make it difficult for multi-year nurses to keep their jobs, but let this type of over the top behavior maybe not go un-noticed, but certainly no one is losing their positions over this kind of stuff.
Just so wrong on a number of levels.
OMG, I totally agree with you. I know a lady who used to be a nurse manager in a certain dept. of her hospital, but was recently promoted to the main nurse manager over hundreds of nurses now at that hospital. This woman is pure evil. She looks so sweet & innocent. She is petite and has a sweet face, and claims to be a good Godly woman.... but ohhhh if you cross her, "she'll back stab you to death." She has caused so many nurses to become depressed in their work, or lose their jobs. She took the credit for many other nurses' hard work, when she did absolutely NOTHING at work... except walk the floors looking to steal credit from others good doings. I'm not really even sure how this woman got through nursing school. She totally "brown nosed" her way through management up the corporate ladder. I am still in disbelief that this woman got the position she is in. I just sit and wonder how & why bullies & brown nosers like this end up in superior management positions or keep their jobs??
I may get flamed for this, but I think most of the OP is crap. I think nursing tends to attract a lot insecure, "type A" personalities (who go on to precept unfortunately) and low class people who never held a professional title in their lives. They then become "drunk" on their new status as an RN (as if it they went to medical school... hah) and start throwing their weight around.
Youthful traditional BSN grads don't tend to fit into the bully stereotypes, I have noticed.. It's always fairly ignorant, undereducated former waitresses former CNAs, former babysitters, with a kid out of wedlock, who go to "get their RN" at CCs and never have any interest in furthering their education again, who act like bullies we encounter. They lived a life of being low class and getting pushed around. They become nurses and then think it's their turn.
I may get flamed for this, but I think most of the OP is crap. I think nursing tends to attract a lot insecure, "type A" personalities (who go on to precept unfortunately) and low class people who never held a professional title in their lives. They then become "drunk" on their new status as an RN (as if it they went to medical school... hah) and start throwing their weight around.
Youthful traditional BSN grads don't tend to fit into the bully stereotypes, I have noticed.. It's always fairly ignorant, undereducated former waitresses former CNAs, former babysitters, with a kid out of wedlock, who go to "get their RN" at CCs and never have any interest in furthering their education again, who act like bullies we encounter. They lived a life of being low class and getting pushed around. They become nurses and then think it's their turn.
Speaking of living "a life of being low class"....
Specializes in Cardiac, ER, Pediatrics, Corrections.
It is our job to decipher whether we are getting constructive criticism or maybe the nurse was having a bad day and snapped at you. Sometimes we need to toughen up and let it brush off. BUT we must decipher whether it is legit bullying. Bullying is just plain WRONG. Abuse, slander, taunting, mean teasing is unacceptable.
I may get flamed for this, but I think most of the OP is crap. I think nursing tends to attract a lot insecure, "type A" personalities (who go on to precept unfortunately) and low class people who never held a professional title in their lives. They then become "drunk" on their new status as an RN (as if it they went to medical school... hah) and start throwing their weight around.
Youthful traditional BSN grads don't tend to fit into the bully stereotypes, I have noticed.. It's always fairly ignorant, undereducated former waitresses former CNAs, former babysitters, with a kid out of wedlock, who go to "get their RN" at CCs and never have any interest in furthering their education again, who act like bullies we encounter. They lived a life of being low class and getting pushed around. They become nurses and then think it's their turn.
I do not think there is a formula for predicting a bully. The only common factor I see is that is a miserable person, whether fed with a silver spoon or clawing their way out of the gutter. Personally I admire a person who tries to better themselves, and I have seen those who have done that be very integral, professional people. Just my say.
I am sure I am about to get flamed for posting this, but I feel the need to anyways. I have been seeing these threads talking about bullying and teachers or preceptors hating the students, and new nurses or abusing them because of some perceived slight or injustice. Well guess what young un's? The world is a hard cold nasty place that does not need to be polite to you or worry whether your feelings got hurt and you feel offended. You need to grow up and realize that the abuse that you claim is rampant, or the bullying that you experience all the time is not their problem, but rather your problem.
I see so many posts about this and I wonder how some of these people have survived as long as they have. School is tough? Deal with it. You think that someone else is getting it easier? Well too bad, they may be but no one ever promised you everything would be fair. You have to learn that there is inequality in life. It's how you overcome that inequality that matters. It teaches perseverance.
Abusive teachers? Maybe they are trying to get the best in you to come out. What you think is abuse maybe is pushing you to your limits, to get you further along in your potential. So your feelings got hurt at school, grow up, feelings get hurt every day.
Your preceptor is unorganized and does not like you and bad mouths you to your manager, and all your patients love you but no one at the hospital sees how great you really are? Well your preceptor may actually have great time management skill, but when having to slow down and teach someone their job, things do tend to get disorganized. You may be part of the blame there. Did you ever stop to think that you are the proverbial monkey wrench in a well oiled machine? The need to teach you, and I realize you do need to learn, can be very time consuming. They may tell your manager that you need improving or that you are not advancing fast enough. They may be all smiles to you, because they want to support you and keep you positive, but they need to tell the manager how you really are.
Speaking of orientation, how often have I seen statements that say the other nurses are not supportive and will not answer questions. Have you ever thought that maybe you are asking TOO MANY questions? After a bit it may seem that you are not retaining the info provided and everyone gets tired of answering the same questions over and over. Part of learning is knowing when to shut your mouth and just watch. It has been said by people wiser than me that the only question you should ask is the question that you already know the answer to. If that does not make sense to you, think about it for a while and you might just be surprised that a light comes on.
So basically what i am saying is grow up and act like the adult that you are. Life is not fair, school is not fair, work is not fair. You just have to learn to deal with it.
For the OP. I just received an emailed notice from AACN. They're hosting a webinar about bullying at work. You still think people just need to "grow up," that there's no systemic problem here?
I may get flamed for this, but I think most of the OP is crap. I think nursing tends to attract a lot insecure, "type A" personalities (who go on to precept unfortunately) and low class people who never held a professional title in their lives. They then become "drunk" on their new status as an RN (as if it they went to medical school... hah) and start throwing their weight around.
Youthful traditional BSN grads don't tend to fit into the bully stereotypes, I have noticed.. It's always fairly ignorant, undereducated former waitresses former CNAs, former babysitters, with a kid out of wedlock, who go to "get their RN" at CCs and never have any interest in furthering their education again, who act like bullies we encounter. They lived a life of being low class and getting pushed around. They become nurses and then think it's their turn.
Wow. Such hateful stereotyping of people who often, through no fault of their own, have not had the opportunities that strong family support systems, access to quality education, and sufficient/ample financial resources make possible. You sound like a very immature, prejudiced person. How sad.
No, the "youthful, traditional BSN grads" (you appear to be excluding people who received their BSN, after, God forbid, attending a "horror of horrors, community college" for their ADN) do not bully (!). Just the "lower class" folks.
Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.
I may get flamed for this, but I think most of the OP is crap. I think nursing tends to attract a lot insecure, "type A" personalities (who go on to precept unfortunately) and low class people who never held a professional title in their lives. They then become "drunk" on their new status as an RN (as if it they went to medical school... hah) and start throwing their weight around.
Youthful traditional BSN grads don't tend to fit into the bully stereotypes, I have noticed.. It's always fairly ignorant, undereducated former waitresses former CNAs, former babysitters, with a kid out of wedlock, who go to "get their RN" at CCs and never have any interest in furthering their education again, who act like bullies we encounter. They lived a life of being low class and getting pushed around. They become nurses and then think it's their turn.
Wow. Sweeping generalizations, hostile attitude toward fellow nurses.... I can't say what I'm thinking due to TOS, so, just wow.
Ruby Vee, BSN
17 Articles; 14,051 Posts
There were plenty of upsides ! Long time ago. I had just left my abusive husband and was not yet a fully functioning mentally healthy adult!