Comments on: Common Sense, Right Out The Window

By: MD

MD — Tue, 24 May 2005 16:04:49 +0000

Uuhh, there’s absolutely nothing that this nurse did that is deserving of props. She was rude and uncouth to a beginning student. Worse, she persisted that way for the rest of the month. The med student is being very gentlemanly by saying the things he has, and indeed was very tactful with her.

That’s to his credit, but it does nothing to change the fact that the nurse is a *bleep*.

I would be very interested in how nurses would have responded if the roles were reversed, and the story was about a senior doc who lashed out at a mere nursing student, and was also consistently rude for a month.

Would any nurse have said “I’m glad you realize how crucially important doctors are and gave him props. Doctors virtually always understand the biomedical and psychosocial conundrums of the patient better than anyone else…”

By: Carsten

Carsten — Tue, 10 May 2005 20:14:00 +0000

Ha ha, great! Reminds me of the time when another staff member asked me, the resident technology guru, to check out why the brand new monitors were unable to get a pulse-ox reading on a patient. I went into the patient’s room, and checked the monitor. The module was set up correctly, all cords were plugged in, and the probe was glowing its characteristic red. I myself was puzzled for a minute, when I had a thought. I checked for the patient’s radial pulse. Absent. I checked for a carotid pulse. Also absent. I reported back to the staff member “the reason you can’t get a pulse-ox reading is because the patient doesn’t have a pulse.”

Luckily for us, the patient was a DNR.

By: Nurse Practitioners Save Lives

Nurse Practitioners Save Lives — Wed, 04 May 2005 17:49:06 +0000

I’m glad that you realize that people should give the nurses their “props”. Often, the bedside nurse is more knowledgable about the patient than the doctor who spends less than two minutes with them. I don’t agree with nurses with bad attitudes though. It makes for a long shift for everyone around them. Great story!