So I am a new grad who just started orientation (wednesday) on a med/geriatrics unit (exactly where I wanted to be!). Each nurse here has 16 patients. The first two days went pretty well, but those were calm days. My coworkers are amazing and soooo kind with me, I already feel like I've been there for 3 months! The only thing is that I realized that I had issues that could compromise my orientation.
First, is that I absolutely suck at drawing blood! I can start an IV most of the time, but drawing blood even with a butterfly has been an impossible task. So far I've had about 20 attempts and I can count on one hand the times I got it. Everyone tells me it comes with practice and I understand I should give that a little more time.
The biggest issue is that I really have trouble focusing on one thing at time. Like if I am charting my assessment on a patient and an order for another patient would come up I'd take care of that thinking Ooooh it will only 2 minutes. It's like I constantly have my head in the clouds and I made my first mistakes yesterday. After a doctor made an order suggesting something, we have to call the patient's doctor so they can say whether they agree with the order or not. If they do, we have to write Ok, Dr. X, on the order so everybody knows they've been informed. I called the doctor but forget to write okay on the order so the evening nurse called the doctor again and he was mad we kept calling him about this. I also got an order to cease all Dilaudid for a patient and new orders of Morphine. Ceased the regular and PRN between regular doses, but didn't see there was PO Dilaudid. I just noticed that I forgot when pharmacy sent us back little stickers to show us what's in their system now. Yesterday just before shift change we received an IV antibiotic to give STAT to a patient, so I started it but completely forgot to sign it before I left. I went back this morning to sign it.
I just feel like I shouldn't make such mistakes since my days were less busy than some of my friends who started at the same time as me who are on CRAZY units with 10-13 patients too.
I needed to vent, but I was also wondering ; did any of you had similar issues when you started? How did you get over it?
