Don't know if I've ever posted before today (been a member for a while), but a post in another thread prompted me to respond to it and to post this. I've spent the last few years preparing for a career change into nursing and am in my first semester as a BSN student, and I'm irritated. I am NOT bashing nursing as a profession, but I am dismayed at the constant whining and complaining as well as the lack of any trace of intellectual curiosity that I have found in my short time around the profession among many BUT NOT ALL nurses. The #1 complaint among nurses that I have seen is a lack of respect by other health care professionals. You want to know why there is a lack of respect? Read on. In my short time, I've been around amazing nurses (bright, dedicated and excellent in what they do), but there are far too many that should be doing some else. Here's why nursing gets less respect than it should...
1) Constant whining. Nursing school is too hard, floor nursing is too hard, etc. News flash: most professions are really hard. Nursing isn't special in that regard. Medicine is brutal. IT, my former career, is cut throat. School teachers often have a miserable jobs. Cops work bad shifts and put their lives on the line. The list goes on an on. People that whine about nursing would whine no matter what career they are in.
2) The nursing culture. The claim of nursing being a "caring profession" (as if med techs, rad techs, RT's, etc. aren't caring), yet there is constant bashing of "bad" patients that are "noncompliant." In addition, many nurses go out of their way to humiliate students and new grads, talk about each other behind their backs, call physicians and other providers incompetent, and are in general rude, sour and bitter. Yet nursing is supposed to be the "caring" profession.
3) The nursing culture part II: Running around the hospital with balloons, teddy bears, flowers, whatever on your scrubs says to your colleagues, "I don't have a brain."
4) Nursing education. Learning to "diagnose" a patient with "Ineffective coping mechanisms related to disturbed transpersonal energy field" sounds like a bunch of hooey to a lot of people. Why? Because it is. It too screams, "I don't have a brain." Thankfully such stuff is only in the textbooks and not in the real world.
5) Feminization. I have heard ad nauseum that traditionally, physicians are men, nurses are women and that accounts for much of the disrespect. I actually agree. Ironically, many more women now are entering all health fields traditionally dominated by men (pharmacy, medicine, etc.) but there's barely been an uptick in the number of men going into nursing. Why? See #3 above for starters. Here's some other reasons. The local Sigma Theta Tau chapter at my school has brown and pink for their colors. The local CC has a teddy bear wearing an 1800's nursing hat and a big heart on its (her) chest (that'll make males race to apply to the program). Which, BTW, also screams, "I don't have a brain."
6) Lack of intellectual curiosity/knowledge. See #3 and #5 as well. One of my instructors this semester (who is a licensed pediatric nurse practitioner) could not answer a question as to what a lesion is. A nurse during my clinical last week did not know the difference between a H2 antagonist and a proton pump inhibitor, yet has been nursing for 20 years. My clinical instructor (with an MSN) "corrected" me and explained that myasthenia gravis is an intestinal disorder. I'm guessing they are like the students I had in my science prereqs that hated science and were just glad to get them done so they could apply to nursing school - never mind the fact that the sciences are the foundation of all modern health care practice. Would you go to a doctor that hated or was bad at science? What about a respiratory or physical therapist? Do everyone a favor - if you hate or are bad at science, spare your future patients and find another career.
In short, there's got to be a change in nursing culture for the profession to be respected.
Specializes in Peds/outpatient FP,derm,allergy/private duty.
QUOTE=sarjasy;4312715]. . . Finally, my entire post was about the perception of nurses by other health care professionals - not by patients or other nurses. Here is what I wrote originally: "The #1 complaint among nurses that I have seen is a lack of respect by other health care professionals." That statement was what my entire post was about.
Then you really needn't have bothered with your six points because I don't believe that lack of respect from other healthcare professionals is the number one complaint from nurses. I would think your one and only premise would have been extensively backed up by countless studies instead of "the public's perception" of nurses being backed up by countless studies, when you are denying that the public's perception was even an issue based on your statement that your entire post was about other healthcare professional's perceptions of nurses. Not very scientific of you.
Sorry, little angel on my shoulder, the other guy won the argument.
I'd really like it if this thread was made a sticky thread. Because I really would like to read every post---this is great stuff---although it would take me a week to get through all of them.
I agree that it is not other health care workers who do not respect nurses. In all my years of nursing I have never had a problem with other health care workers except for a few egotistical physicians who treat EVERYONE badly. It is the public who need us the most, epecially the generally health public who never experience nursing care but instead depend on the media for information about what we do.
Scrubs? Well that needs to be an administrative decision. I think patterns are great in peds, but prefer them to be color-coded to the area that the nurse is working in. It helps identify personnel. I think a decent dress code is important anywhere.
Science? Well I think nursing is an art based in scientific principles. We need to know it, but not everyone has a passion for it. That does not mean they cannot be a nurse. Many areas of nursing do not rely a lot on science, other than signs and symptoms- as long as my nurse knows if I am blue I am showing signs of a low oxygen status then I really don't care if she can give me a dissertation on physiology or chemistry. What you don't use you lose and obviously nurses do not always have time to keep up knowledge that they are not using. There are new things to learn every single day at work like new meds, new equipment, new techniques.
When you are a student and fresh out of school with a head full of knowledge you can gloat and wonder about us old-timers. How can we function as we do? But honey, we were young and full of knowledge once too, with another generation of old-timers who were on the floors and did not know all the things we did.
It is respect for one another that matters more than anything. We are all in this together and we need the spirit and pride in ourselves and each other that the military or the police have. Respect your fellow nurses, by the responses I think others are really tuning in to your own attitude of disrepect and critique of our profession, our calling. We are lightyears from where we once were- read our history. We need to stick together. We are one, we are nurses.
I have to agree with # 3. One place I worked in had a different event each day for Nurses Week, including "crazy socks day" and a wheelchair decorating competition.
When I see physicians participating in such silliness, maybe I'll consider it...
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Why are they your "god"? Or are they some sort of benchmark of morality in the healthcare field?
I don't know what's more annoying about this thread...the fact that it's written by a nursing student who has never walked in our shoes or the fact that the stuff written is a bunch of garbage or both? Can't tell but it's pretty darn insulting!
About the scrubs though...I have never liked floral scrubs, I like them solid but that's my preference. I can't impose MY preference on anyone:)
you may think you only refered to "only a subset" of nurses of the (very small number) you've seen thus far, but in your op you specified "many" - which makes it harder for readers to see themselves as separate from the nurses you criticised. and i am certainly not disagreeing with your perception that, out of the small subset of all nurses there are, the perception of nurses by other health care professionals is their biggest concern/complaint/issue, though in my experience other issues (like workload, pay, paperwork, lack of support from nursing hierarchy, patients and family members confusing their priorities for ours, and workload again) usually rank higher.
your central thesis is that nurses aren't respected because they are whiny, uninformed, uninterested in learning, project a feminised image of themselves, and wear cutesy clothes.
to take your recent response a point at a time:
(1) i simply don’t understand how my lack of experience has any bearing on the topics at hand. i don’t see how i need 10 years of rn experience to point out that teddy bear characters on a nursing school’s web page don’t attract men to nursing. how would rn experience better qualify me to point that i have been exposed to an abnormal amount of whining, or that my fellow students and nurses that i have been exposed to don’t take science seriously? why do i need years of experience to point out the obvious that many nursing diagnoses are totally lacking in reality? or that scrubs with flowers all over them don’t look professional? what i’ve said is either right or wrong and experience has nothing to do with it.
- i agree that "teddy bear characters on a nursing school's web page don't attract men to nursing" and that this is an issue. however, everyoneofthefirsttengooglehits i got for "school of nursing" was teddy bear (etc) free, and the majority represented male nurses as well as female nurses. in any case, i suspect few of our non-nursing colleagues spend much time looking at nursing school web sites, so i suspect this point is really doing other work.
similarly, the majority of whining (which is, at least some of the time, debriefing) is conducted away from other health professionals.
there are many threads here criticising and defending nursing diagnoses - i fall more heavily in the critical camp, but believe they serve a purpose as a learning tool to develop critical thinking and tease out aspects of care and interventions that students may otherwise be unaware of; as you pointed out in your op, they're used in education rather than on the wards and so, once again, play a minimal role in contributing to disrepsect from other health professionals. i'll get to your view on scrubs shortly.
(2) my tone may have sounded harsh to some, but as i mentioned in my original post, my post was a result of frustration. i was venting. perhaps it was a bad idea on my part for posting a "negative" post as my first major post to this board. i believe that there are many awesome things about nursing, which is why i chose it over many other healthcare fields (pharmacy, physician assistant, optometry, others). i’m as excited as ever about my career choice. i was merely pointing out what i see as problems in our profession. all professions have problems and for any profession to improve, those in it must be honest about their problems.
it's perhaps a shame that you didn't open with the positives you feel about nursing, and responding earlier may have reduced the 'drive by' aspect of your post. however, i don't recall criticism that your post was harsh - my impression was that many members felt it was uninformed.
i wrote in an earlier post that being a student is not the same as being an academic. it's also not the same as being a practitioner - i added:
the response to the op has been vociferous in part because, based on a semester of partial observation, s/he feels comfortable that s/he has seen enough to not only identify this issue (which is only one of many) but deconstruct it into its constitutent parts. and then post his/her observations in a way that is inappropriately top down for someone with virtually no experience in the field.
your tone wasn't venting, it was didactic lecturing, which is difficult enough to take from a qualified educator. this lack of experience is most evident in the (vigorously defended) perspective of scrubs, which you identify as both unprofessional and a flag that indicates brainlessness.
traditional professional attire across the board is a suit and tie; in nursing, traditional attire is a starched white dress and cap, neither of which allow for the physical contortions, intimate care, close contact with body substances that nursing entails. it's this outfit that your cited reference mentions, though interestingly (given your repeated statement that you're focussing not on patient perceptions and respect but other health professionals') chitty only specifies patient confusion about who's caring for them now that nurses are no longer "instantly identifiable" in their "traditional white caps and uniforms of yesteryear" but instead clad in "ubiquitous scrubs." and chitty mentions that the traditional uniforms may have "projected a stereotypical image rather than a realistic perception of nurses as autonomous providers with a high level of education and scientific expertise," so returning to them isn't the answer, quite apart from the fact that white dresses an d caps are considerably more feminine than teddy bears.
you're right that there are issues in nursing, and that attire is one of these issues - at least as far back as 1969 (howe) - though most of the research looks at patient and relative perceptions of, and ability to identify, nurses. pratt and rafaeli (1997) found that the issue of uniform/organisational attire is complex, deeply symbolic and emblematic, and that perceptions varied among nurses working at the same institution. skoruspki and rhea (2006) compared perceptions of four kinds of uniforms and ten characteristics, finding that
the white uniform was the most frequently selected for 5 of the 10 characteristics: confident, reliable, competent, professional, and efficient. the print uniform was most frequently associated with the other 5 characteristics: caring, attentive, cooperative, empathetic, and approachable. in contrast, the solid uniform was least of ten selected for 6 of the 10 characteristics with the print uniform being least often selected for the remaining 4 characteristics.
for overall images, the white uniform was paradoxically the uniform most often selected as the nurse that patients would "not like to take care of you" but also most often selected as being "easiest to identify as a nurse." the print uniform was the most often selected as the nurse "you would most like to take care of you." the solid was the least often selected both as being the nurse "you would most like to take care of you" and as the "easiest to identify."
the overwhelming message in the research about nurses and uniforms is that patients find it easier to identify nurses if they wear white, because it's hard to differentiate between nurses and other staff members. that doesn't seem to be a problem where i work, where traditional uniforms were discontinued because the only other people who wore them were support staff, while the professionals (doctors, allied health) wore street clothes. though care seems less fragmented here than in the us (there aren't respiratory therapists, for example, and in acute care at least, few if any patient attendants/aides), i've found introducing myself to patients and families when i meet them also goes a long way toward avoiding confusion.
there may be research looking at whether other staff members care about nurses' attire, but if so it's less prevalent than research looking at patient and family attitudes, which you state was not your concern in this regard.
you mention the need for nursing to be honest. i suspect much of your issue with nursing attire, and nursing in general, comes not from internal professional concern with the way we're perceived by other professions so much as your discomfort or other concern with the feminism of nursing - the way it's perceived and the way it presents itself. that's fine, and it's a valid point, but masking it as concern about the way nurses are seen by other professions doesn't do anything to address it.
Look I am a recent grad from December of 2008. I have now worked a year in med-surg. NOTHING is like how they told you it would be in school. So I think that you should wait till you have "walked a mile in our shoes", so to speak, to judge us. Also I complain on this website at times because, other people outside the profession just don't understand.
you may think you only refered to "only a subset" of nurses of the (very small number) you've seen thus far, but in your OP you specified "many" - which makes it harder for readers to see themselves as separate from the nurses you criticised.
Fair enough, that might be true in regard to the way my post was received. There is some parsing of words here - the words "subset" and "many" in my post are referring to the same amount. By these two words, I do not mean a majority but a large enough number to have a negative influence on the profession.
I agree that "teddy bear characters on a nursing school's web page don't attract men to nursing" and that this is an issue. However, everyoneofthefirsttengooglehits I got for "school of nursing" was teddy bear (etc) free
Not relevant. That's like saying I did a search on Google for "African Americans" and none of the first 10 results were racists, therefore racism doesn't exist.
I suspect few of our non-nursing colleagues spend much time looking at nursing school web sites, so I suspect this point is really doing other work.
Never said that teddy bears on web pages made our colleagues look down on the profession (thought it would if they saw them). I said that male students are turned off by it, and those considering the profession DO look at nursing school web sites.
At any rate, the teddy-bear-on-a-web-page example was just that - an example. There are countless others including nursing profession websites, publications, etc. that are feminine in their presentation and assumptions. These serve to drive males away from the profession, and nursing is the last health care profession that I can think of that has not been making significant strides in this area.
Similarly, the majority of whining (which is, at least some of the time, debriefing) is conducted away from other health professionals.
Of the examples I cite, you are probably correct here (though I don't have floor experience, so what do I know?). But there is plenty of public whining too.
There are many threads here criticising and defending nursing diagnoses - I fall more heavily in the critical camp, but believe they serve a purpose as a learning tool...
I agree. They are good for helping define scope of practice too. Some of them are an outright embarrassment, though. I don't know how "minimal" of a role they play or not, as they are seen mostly by nursing students only. However, any outsider that did see them couldn't help but lose a notch or two of respect for the profession. Let's face it, many nursing diagnoses are even laughed at by nurses.
However, I don't recall criticism that your post was harsh - my impression was that many members felt it was uninformed.
Your tone wasn't venting, it was didactic lecturing, which is difficult enough to take from a qualified educator.
So which is it? Word parsing here. If some felt my post was "didactic lecturing" (is there such a thing as non-didactic lecturing? :)) I think it would be reasonable to describe it as harsh, no?
The overwhelming message in the research about nurses and uniforms is that patients find it easier to identify nurses if they wear white, because it's hard to differentiate between nurses and other staff members.
Correct, that is where much of the research lies, but my point of citing research was two-fold if you recheck my post. My mentioning abundant research was to illustrate that scrubs/uniforms are and important topic and not trivial as some have suggested. Regardless of the reason (professionalism, identification, whatever), printed scrubs have never been identified as what nurses should wear. There may be one study (I can't recall) that looks at printed scrubs in peds and says they are good there, but I'm not sure.
There may be research looking at whether other staff members care about nurses' attire, but if so it's less prevalent than research looking at patient and family attitudes, which you state was not your concern in this regard.
Its prevalence or lack thereof is not relevant. Furthermore, family/patient perception was not my concern; I only mentioned the research because many were citing positive patient/family perceptions to printed scrubs. I was pointing out the even the research the deals with patient/family perceptions did not identify printed scrubs as a preference.
You mention the need for nursing to be honest. I suspect much of your issue with nursing attire, and nursing in general, comes not from internal professional concern with the way we're perceived by other professions so much as your discomfort or other concern with the feminism of nursing
I think you can tell by now I don't hold opinions back. My concern with nursing image IS related to how it is viewed by other professions - no need to read something into my posts that aren't there. Besides, I addressed the feminization of nursing not the "feminism" of nursing, which are two entirely different things, BTW. Feminization means female-likeness whereas feminism is a political movement.
...but masking it as concern about the way nurses are seen by other professions doesn't do anything to address it.
As I mentioned, I am masking nothing. I confess the suggestion of such tweaks me a bit. Believe me, what you see is what you get. I feel no need to "mask" anything. I have no problem saying what I really believe if you haven't noticed already.
1. Technically, a group that contained every nurse but one would still be a sub-set of nursing; colloquially there's a difference between referring to 'a majority,' 'many,' and 'a sub-set.' As only a small sub-set of nurses of nurses use a mathematical interpretation when reading writing aimed at a general audience, it's reasonable to assume that the term 'sub-set' would be interpreted as referring to a smaller percentage of the group than 'many,' which is why I pointed out the difference.
2. a) I at no time suggested that there are no nursing websites, academic or otherwise, that sport teddy bears. My point was that, though your school's site may, it's not an endemic issue. Leaving aside your long bow of conflating feminised websites with racism - an annecdotal sample of one does not a prevalent problem make.
2. b) As nursel56 so astutely pointed out, you specifically stated that your
entire post was about the perception of nurses by other health care professionals - not by patients or other nurses. Here is what I wrote originally: "The #1 complaint among nurses that I have seen is a lack of respect by other health care professionals." That statement was what my entire post was about.
So my response that other professions don't look at nursing websites was relevant both as a rebuttal to your post and as data supporting my position that you're more troubled about the non-masculine persona of nursing. To whit:
At any rate, the teddy-bear-on-a-web-page example was just that - an example. There are countless others including nursing profession websites, publications, etc. that are feminine in their presentation and assumptions. These serve to drive males away from the profession, and nursing is the last health care profession that I can think of that has not been making significant strides in this area.
Hmm. Are you saying that other professions disrespect nursing because it's predominantly female? The majority of acute care physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists and dieticians/nutritionists are female, while women constitute roughly half of pharmacy and medical school intakes. I'm pretty sure that, when you refer to other professions judging us you're referring to these professions, who are unlikely to be regarding us poorly based on our gender.
That's not to say that a group's gender composition is unrelated to the status, salary and regard of that group, nor that nursing has been unable to substantially recruit men. But you didn't say "the number one issue nurses have is a lack of respect from other health care professionals, which is caused (or significantly contributed to) by the ongoing gender disparity in nursing; this issue is compounded by the feminised image nursing itself puts forward, as evidenced by infantalising scrub patterns and teddy bear-festooned websites."
3. Thrilled though I am that you agree I'm probably right in at least one regard, I'm unconvinced that "there is plenty of public whining too," particularly as you acknowledge you have no floor experience. Is this public whining taking place in front of patients, at nurses' stations, on the streets, on boards like this?
4. I'm confused about your response to my comment about the inconsequential role NANDA diagnoses make to the way other health professions see nursing. In the same sentence you both imply that you disagree that the role is minimally significant ("I don't know how "minimal" of a role they play or not") and then acknowledge that "they are seen mostly by nursing students only." Ditching a learning tool that you agree has value because it could be seen by "any outsider" seems a little extreme, quite apart from the fact that I suspect few members of other professions have the time or interest to investigate nursing education programs and techniques. I also disagree that "many nursing diagnoses are even laughed at by nurses" - I have an issue with a couple of them (the oft-cited energy fields in particular) but the vast majority are wholly valid.
5. "Parsing" refers to the grammatical structure of a sentence or part of a sentence (eg the syntactical form of a specific word in an analysed sentence). However, I agree that "didactic lecture" is a tautology, and "lecture" alone would have sufficed. So: Your tone wasn't venting, it was lecturing, which is difficult enough to take from a qualified educator. The emphasis there is on 'qualified' - it is for this reason that your lack of experience was raised multiple times.
And I say again: I don't recall criticism that your post was harsh - my impression was that many members felt it was uninformed. I assume you used the word in its third meaning, that you think your post was seen as severe or unduly exacting, rather than that it was physically painful or physically irritating. However, if by harsh you meant "crude, lacking in aesthetic appeal or refinement," then you may be partly right, in as much as it was not designed to elicit change, was didactic and above all was uninformed.
6. If the whole point of your post is that other health professions lack respect for nursing, and you contend that part of this is down to what we wear, anything you cite should support your position. There is indeed abundant research on the topic of nursing attire, none of which seems to support your premise that it affects how our colleagues see us.
Nursing attire in general, though, is clearly a hot button issue. I've started a thread on the topic, and perhaps we could direct discussions about what people other than non-nursing health care professionals think about whites, scrubs, patterns etc there, allowing this thread to focus on your stated concern, the perception on nursing by other health care professionals.
7. I don't like to assume that I can tell how restrained people are being based on their posts. I, for example, have held many of my opinions back while contributing to this thread. The reason I've read more into your posts is because you return so often to the feminine aspects of nursing presentation. And yes, I did mistype "feminism" instead of "feminisation" when posting late at night - as you can see from my sig line, I have at least some awareness of the suffrage movement (aka first wave feminism), hence the use of purple and green, as well as the quote by Rebecca West.
But if we're going to be picky, and clearly we are, I don't know that you can use 'feminisation' to refer to a traditionally female-dominated group - feminisation is the process of a man developing or assuming feminine characeristics and/or appearance. In sociology it refers to "the incorporation of women into a group or profession that was once dominated by men [source]." It may be more accurate to refer to the lack of masculinisation and/or gender-neutral qualities of nursing.
Never said that teddy bears on web pages made our colleagues look down on the profession (thought it would if they saw them). I said that male students are turned off by it, and those considering the profession DO look at nursing school web sites.
At any rate, the teddy-bear-on-a-web-page example was just that - an example. There are countless others including nursing profession websites, publications, etc. that are feminine in their presentation and assumptions. These serve to drive males away from the profession, and nursing is the last health care profession that I can think of that has not been making significant strides in this area.
Which male students are so turned off by teddy bears? Are they the same ones that are bummed because they are not allowed to wear nurse's hats on pinning day? Are they the same ones that are annoyed that they are again stuck with floral-scented lotion gifts from their job for Christmas, because that's what all the nurses received from the boss? Every dude nurse I've known puts up with all of it because they know from day 1 of nursing school that women dominate nursing by the numbers, and as such, there may be some cutesy, feminine things along the way in the male's nursing experience that wouldn't arise in, say, diesel mechanic training.
If a man is completely turned off by the idea of nursing school simply because of a teddy bear or other cutesy image used by the school, he doesn't really belong in the program in the first place. There are more important things to find silly in nursing school, like the disturbed energy field nursing diagnosis.
At any rate, the formerly disgusted-by-teddy-bears male student will love it when his first workplace issues him "unisex" scrubs that are still made mostly for the female shape.
A sub-set is generally recognized as a portion of a portion (as distinguished from a set, which is a portion of the whole), as in: if, of all cars, 50% have stripes, and 50% of striped cars have two doors...then striped, two doored cars are a sub-set of all cars - the set being striped cars and the whole being all cars.
For most intents and purposes, "many" denotes a large portion of a whole - at least a third - probably slightly beyond half, before "most" takes over. But, "too many" is a purely subjective count - since one person's idea of too many could easily differ from another's. It is pointless for two people to argue about exactly how many is too many. But I think most people would agree that one is not enough to prove a point.
My concern with nursing image IS related to how it is viewed by other professions - no need to read something into my posts that aren't there. Besides, I addressed the feminization of nursing not the "feminism" of nursing, which are two entirely different things, BTW. Feminization means female-likeness whereas feminism is a political movement.
nursel56
7,122 Posts
Then you really needn't have bothered with your six points because I don't believe that lack of respect from other healthcare professionals is the number one complaint from nurses. I would think your one and only premise would have been extensively backed up by countless studies instead of "the public's perception" of nurses being backed up by countless studies, when you are denying that the public's perception was even an issue based on your statement that your entire post was about other healthcare professional's perceptions of nurses. Not very scientific of you.
Sorry, little angel on my shoulder, the other guy won the argument.