I Heart You, ER Nurses!
I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy to relax in my few hours of freedom per day, and I must say, nurses totally get the shaft on the show. Addison is always rooming patients in the ER, checking vitals, and hanging fluids, as if the physicians on the show are these solo practitioners who can do everything for everyone (surgical interns staffing a free clinic, ha!)
ER nurses can laugh with the best of them, and are incredibly fun to work with when the patients are stable. They’re even more amazing to watch when patients go bad. One patient went from looking mildly uncomfortable to coding (needing CPR) in the span of about 3 or 4 minutes, and just like a switch was flipped on, the nurses swooped in and knew exactly what to do. Two secured IVs, another started documenting, and a fourth was pulling meds. I’ve seen the phenomenon a number of times now, and it’s really, really impressive. The teamwork is fantastic. One of the reasons I love the ER.
I remember a patient once asking a Peds nurse why he went into nursing. His reply: “I wanted to help patients. Doctors diagnose patients, but it’s the nurses that actually treat them.”
My hat is off!
cheers to that … and the oncology nurses … awesome, make friends and you can get great updates on your patients, get stuff done for your patients and become an IV pro
Yeah Graham!!!!
You ROCK on this post, love you for acknowledging nurses. Many people don’t know, but in order to obtain a B.S. degree in nursing from a university it usually takes ~ 6 years –> 2 years of GE that no one gets away with, then try to apply into a nursing program with a curriculum ~ 6-7 semesters depends which school one chooses. Then one more semester of upper GE in order to graduate.
In nursing school, we are mandated to rotate through 10-15 specialties, and a required > 2000 certified clinical hours in order to satisfy and sit for state requirement for licensure and examination. We have to take at least a year of pharmacology….MD writes Rx, nurses educate in detail upon discharges…so that explains the rest of the rotations. I think that NURSING as a profession historically has a negative connotation and imagery promoted from the SOAP shows on TV that are often no more viewed as a sexual object without a brain. I am so glad to hear from future physicians such as yourself to acknowledge everyone on the healthcare team are important in their roles in order to work successfully as a team.
Okay, good luck with everything.
Ellen, RN, FNP, PA-C (the nurse taught you phlebotomy at PFC)
We all know the critical role tha nurses play in a hospital. Many times they are the horoes and not the doctors. Doctors diagnose the patients and organise the plan for their treatment but nurses are the ones who really take care of the patients. Try to imagine a critical care unit without nurses…or should I say that there wouldn’t be any critical care unit without nurses! As future doctors we need well qualified and willing to work hard nurses.
I’ve taught my kids that doctors are the ones who tell you what’s wrong, and the nurses are the ones who help to fix it, and help you feel better. :) In my experience, that’s the truth of it.
My sister-in-law is a nurse and had finished nursing school before my wife, also an MD, and I graduated from med school. She gave us a tip that proved to be one of the more valuable tips we received, namely, “make friends with the nurses and give them respect and they will help you whenever they can.” She was right. Treating nurses as important members of the medical team paid off when it came to caring for the patients on the wards.
I used that tip throughout my residency and my practice. As chief resident, I could often get extra operating time because I didn’t argue with or try belittle the head surgical nurse.
In private practice I could almost always get a nurse to make rounds with me, if I needed them, when some surgeons never could seem to find a nurse to help them, because they were always “chewing them out” over minutae.