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Nursing is a damn hard job that keeps getting harder. Especially if you work in a hospital. What is expected of us is ridiculous. More and more is dumped on us with no real increase in pay. We are responsible for the patient 24/7 and aren't compensated for that responsibility and liability. We are expected to learn technology that is more and more complicated. We are expected to retain mountains of information. We are supposed to smile in the face of verbal and sometimes physical abuse.
So I ain't gonna sugarcoat it folks. It take a tough person to be a nurse. We don't give ourselves credit for doing one of the most difficult jobs out there. It is mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting on a daily basis. The fact that we are able to do it at all is amazing.
One of the reason the public has this unrealistic picture of nursing is that we don't portray it realistically. Nurses need to tell the truth about their profession. How complicated and hard it is. Nursing schools need to tell students how it really is, so they will be prepared. If nursing was portrayed more realistically, you would know what you are getting into.
Do everything you do and then add on an expectation of stocking every one of your rooms, taking out all your rooms' trash and dirty linen, cleaning your rooms' floors AND calling every single discharged patient that comes through your doors to see how their doing (including 18 year olds with back strain, homeless people with crack addictions, people with viral sore throats, etc.) If you're into that...we're hiring! Oh somewhere in there, have the highest acuity patient population in the area too.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's be sure and keep those Press Ganey scores up!
ReplyDeleteWe wouldn't want the winos and crackheads to give us low ratings, and take their business elsewhere, because then we might be stuck caring for patients with actual emergencies, and where's the challenge in that?
You sing those blues loud and proud, and tell the Pollyannas to come walk a shift in your shoes before they pop off about giving the profession a bad rep.
Fairytales are for kids. Nursing is for grown-ups. And on the best day, it's bone-wearyingly soul-crushingly hard, or you're probably not doing it right.
Indeed. Not to mention all the self-hate that comes with the lie that all the manipulation and aggression can just be fixed if you just communicate therapeutically enough! I just wish someone had even once mentioned that, oh, BTW, there is a whole culture of lying assholes out there who will try to abuse and take advantage of you, so I wouldn't have had the guilt associated with making that realization on my own. Except the people who teach are often the ones that couldn't deal with the profession in the first place, so....
ReplyDeleteI get bagged on all the time about my blog and tweets. "You need to be a good nurse online too," someone said. What does that even mean? I should lie? I resent too the implication that bloggers who discuss the less savory aspects of nursing are bringing down the profession somehow. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that sun should shine out of my ass all the time. The public does not know how impossible it is for that to happen. And if you try to tell them, they go "ewwww." And don't get me started with other nurses who tell me what a bad nurse I am just from reading my blog. Seriously? Now that right there is totally bringing down the profession, IMHO.
ReplyDeleteWe keep getting more and more ridiculous-er stuff to do. Like I just heard that now we get to chart and count the carbs a patient eats. Because the kitchen can't bother to serve a limited amount of carbs to our diabetic patients, we get to be a dietician too. Besides of counting pees and poops and breaths and crap, now I have to count carbs.
ReplyDeleteI guess I've been a bad nurse too, for writing about the underside of nursing for the past 20 years. My local AACN Chapter told me I was bad, because I seemed to have such a negative view of hospital life and all the crazy people we deal with. We Nurse bloggers, are the journalists of truth!
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