Fresh out of nursing school and with my brand new RN license, I followed my husband overseas so that he could pursue his studies. So my very first "job" after graduation was in a Scottish hospital. What a shock!
The job duties, the vocabulary and the hospital were a far reach from anything I had experienced as a nursing student in San Francisco.
The ward of the hospital I was assigned to used to be a debtor's prison. This was culture shock. I was used to private and semi-private rooms. I felt like I was experiencing nursing history firsthand. Patients were in "Nightingale wards" with twenty to a room with each bed divided only by curtains.
The walls of brick did not contain the modern conveniences I was used to. Oxygen was brought in huge green canisters and placed by the patient's bedside when ordered. The canisters were extremely heavy and only the orderlies were expected to move them.
Medications had different names than in the United States, although sometimes the generic names were more familiar to me. Paracetemol was used instead of Tylenol and peppermint water was given for indigestion. And instead of sedatives for bedtime, some patients were prescribed a bit of sherry in the evening.
The newest task I had to learn was to serve afternoon tea. I learned to brew the tea the proper way and then arranged the teapot and tea cups and saucers to be taken to each patient's bedside. One afternoon a patient asked me when tea would be served. I replied, "I'll go and get the cart with the tea." The whole ward of patients laughed out loud. "A cart, you're going to bring the tea on a cart? That's what a horse pulls. You mean a trolley." I learned that lollies were candy, and jumpers were pullover sweaters. I called head nurses "Sister". The hardest part was deciphering the different Scottish dialects. In the close quarters it was easy for some patients to translate for me. The word I heard spoken most often was "ken". "I no ken" and "You ken?" New to me, I finally figured out that it meant "know" or "understand".
The whole experience, even the way I dressed and got dressed was different than what I had learned in nursing school. I had to go to the nurse's dormitory each morning to change into my starched white uniform and cap to walk to the hospital.
One morning I returned to a ward to see how a patient was responding to a medication he had been given. There was no response at all. There was no pulse, no respirations. Another nurse and I began CPR. As a student nurse, I'd learned but never used my CPR skills. This time it was for real. The code was called, the physicians and other nurses came, and the orderly with the huge green canister of oxygen arrived. Eventually the patient was resuscitated.
Most importantly I discovered that not everything I learned was different. Some things were merely part of the worldwide culture of nursing.
My experience was just reversed. I trained in a large Canadian hospital in the early 70's with those huge open wards, separated by curtains, where they re-sterilized dressing trays, catheter trays and all manner of equipment that is now disposable. After nursing school I followed my husband to Los Angeles where I worked in a private medical center. I thought I'd gone to another planet, the shock was so great. I called it my "white gloves" nursing job. Everything was disposable, no large green oxygen cylinders or glass chest tube bottles here! This experience seems like centuries ago, now that everything in Canada has caught up.
when we can realize the real importance of providing care to the cultures of the people we care we see these people with respect and never go to take their beliefs and customs ... i appreciate very much that there is an instance like this where one can learn from the experiences of nurses around the world.
DLStango, BSN, RN
27 Posts
Thank you for your observation on the cultures of Nursing. I thoroughly enjoyed your description of that hospital in Scotland.