The ONE thing that will make your nursing life easier

Nurses General Nursing

Published

Hi everyone,

This is a broad question to all of us:

What is that ONE thing that will make your nursing life easier?

This could mean many things like:

- Is there something you wish you discovered earlier in your career that would have made nursing easier?

- Is there something you wish existed that will make nursing easier?

- Is there something that you'd like to eliminate? eg. pain points

Specializes in PCU.
Visiting hours. :)

Boy did you hit it on the head. I miss the days when no one under 14 was allowed on any hospital floors to visit. Just love it when mom brings the 2 year old for the entire day, lets them crawl on the floor, and can't figure out why the child is acting out. Maybe they are tired and bored, or have caught something off the floor?

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Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.

And end to the customer service (or Disney) model of patient care.

Enforced visiting hours.

An end to redundant charting -- let's chart it once in ONE place and everyone who is doing this study or that study can spend the time mining for the information rather than nursing having to fill out their forms.

What I wish I'd learned earlier -- it is better to be liked than to be right. Getting along with your colleagues is the key to teamwork.

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Have that too, direct number for a transporter to get what we need as well as a level of urgency- 1 (stat- patient on table and can't proceed), 2- (urgent, need within 10 minutes), 3 (non-urgent- patient not yet in room). We're lucky if we get level 1 urgency supplies within 15 minutes.

Yeah.......probably not going to happen!

I stood in the hall post MRI bagging an intubated ICU patient with 8 IV pumps waiting for a transporter for 45 minutes to help get *everything* back to the ICU. I finally gave up and pushed *everything* back by myself, while bagging the patient.

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Nothing that entails having to do with customer service satisfaction scores...

Are these scores based solely on the patient or the patient and the family?

New and soon to be one day, just want to make sure I know which or what?

I have heard some stories. Great patients, horrible family members...

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Altras saved my feet and my back! Never doing nights and a more flexible schedule would be awesome. I'm working on those last two. Second the pause button!!

A particular model?

Do you have funky feet?

I marched a lot and walked a lot in the military don't remember my feet really ever bothering me.

Volunteer for the hospital, but not 12 hours. My knees hurt a tad, but...?

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For you or the patients? :p

Yes!!!

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Specializes in Emergency, Trauma, Critical Care.

I always wished there was an audio program that would do our charting for us. Imagine having a microphone like device when you starting an IV and be able to say, 20 gauge left ac and have it charted while you were doing it in real time. Totally possible and perhaps someday in the future.

I could see issues with like screaming pts and having to wait til you stepped out. But the time save potential could be huge.

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Specializes in Emergency, Trauma, Critical Care.
I love Danskos but it I've rolled my ankle a few times wearing them. it's risky business. Those are the only shoes I can wear for a whole shift without my feet singing the blues by the end of the day.

As for support, a good aide is hard to find. It's a low paying gig that attracts either people who aren't the brightest (I'm sorry, there's no nice way to say it) or the super student nurse who's there to tell everyone what her school teaches her to do in your position.

Have you tried allegrias? They're so ugly but I found them a comfy alternate to danskos with no ankle rolling :)

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Specializes in ICU.
A remote control for humans--demanding family members, whining patients, screaming infants, and obnoxious doctors--with a mute button and the ability to render people instantly unconscious.

It's called etomidate. :) Push some etomidate and they are GONE!

Oh, wait - we can't use that on visitors?! Crap.

I just want to have 1:1 assignments for the rest of my career with a sick as crap CRRT patient who's unconscious and a ward of the state with no family. That's all. :bag:

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Specializes in Med Surg, Perinatal, Endoscopy, IVF Lab.

Federally mandated Patient/Staff ratios. Less charting. NO STUPID SURVEYS. :up:

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Specializes in IMC, school nursing.

Second Farawyn, Nurse Managers who can work a floor.

I am constantly reminding my contemporary dinosaurs that the semantics are very important. Head Nurse referred to the head of the nurses, the decision maker for the group, but still included in the group. Head nurses could pull a shift if necessary. Nurse managers are managers who took a nursing route to meet that end. They manage nurses and are not connected to the group. Very important.

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Specializes in Cardiac surgery, Adult ED, HEDIS.

I also think it should be manatory for managers to perform the duties of the staff they manage for a full week, no excuses, every 6 months. A lot of support staff where I work tend to hide, you have to hunt them down, to get them to do 1 small thing. I won't even ask for them to chaperone a pelvic, takes to much time to hunt them down. Easier for me to just take care of it myself. I have learned to only ask if I am drowning.

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