mary the nurse masochist

There is somebody I work with who has labelled how nurses are sometimes treated by patients as bullying. He predicts that in the future nurses will force employers to deal with this. He thinks that the young nurses coming into the profession today won't put up with it like the older nurses have. I hope so.

I wonder why allow ourselves to keep being treated badly by patients? Sometimes I think that we convince ourselves that this person is under stress and normally they wouldn't be like that. We as a group tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, to forgive bad behavior.

Putting up with abuse is taught to us starting in nursing school and reinforced by our employers. We are taught to understand, empathize, to de-escalate. We are told that the patient is always right. We are told patient satisfaction is number one, even if it means taking verbal and sometimes physical abuse. When we object we are told, you knew what this job would be like when you got it. Maybe if you can't handle it, you should move on. In other words, WE are the problem, not the abuser.

We as a group allow ourselves to be treated like we are sub human. In what other job than ours would people allow themselves to be abused? What a strange profession we work in, that this goes on. What a strange group of people we are, to allow it to go on. Why don't we value ourselves more?