03.30.08
Anger mangagement
Disappearing John is worried that too many nurse bloggers are angry. PixelRN thinks perhaps that she is one of those angry nurses. Me? well I think I could have been angry, or more likely burnt out but that I got out just in time. I am proud to call myself a nurse, but I am pretty much done with patients. My life is spent dealing with angry nurses and angry doctors. Yes indeed it seems that everyone out there is unhappy with their lot in life. What is more none of the problem with whatever healthcare system people work in is their fault, it is the fault of someone else. I encounter nurses all the time and generally they are unhappy with their managers, the management (whoever they are), life in general and anyone who has led them into their current predicament. Doctors, and mainly I am encountering paediatricians, obstetricians and GPs, who are either fed up with the government and their targets, the PCT (my employers) and me in general as apparently I am the PCT.
I happily am not angry with anyone at all. I would however like some people I encounter (or indeed see on TV) to understand a few things:
- Healthiness should be something we all want, we should not need the government to tell us what we should do at all times of the day and we should not need to be prescribed a healthy lifestyle. Those of us who work in healthcare should be prepared to help and teach others to know how to do that, but what we don’t need is the Government telling us at every level and at every stage exactly how to do that.
- I have had to learn how the NHS in 2008 is financed and run, it would not hurt you doctors do understand it too (I don’t like it either but it is part of life). If your hospital trust gets funded through payment by results then there is no point asking me for money for a specialist nurse. If there is any change of money being available you already have it (or have the opportunity to earn it).
- Infections are not always something that can be avoided in so far as the cause of them might be complex and not just caused by nurses and doctors forgetting to wash their hands. If antibiotic misuse has been rife and cleaning has been contracted out for years then a deep clean and a bit of alcohol gel will not rid the world of MRSA.
- Since the last reorganisation I am just a pleb, I am not (and indeed nor have I ever been) responsible for all the ills of the NHS
- If you are an ordinary nurse then get on with nursing your patients. Remember that you chose to do this, no one forced you, remember also that to be a specialist nurse / nurse practitioner / consultant nurse it is useful to have served at least some time as a bog standard ordinary nurse before you get yourself better educated and declare yourself somehow better than your peers.
- If someone gets the job of their dreams and feels that they are making a difference then please be happy for them, don’t act as if they are some kind of pariah who needs to be undermined and spoken about behind their back. They have got where they are because (generally) they deserve it and what is more their patients need them.
- If you are offered clinical supervision, a time to get away from patients to discuss the issues of patient management then take that time, use that time and don’t make out that you are far too important and busy to attend such a thing.
- To those who work in TV, well not all nurses are killers, not all nurses are uncaring bitches and actually most of us care about what happens to people. Showing us one example of an unhappy / ill served patient does none of us any service at all.
Ian Furst said,
March 30, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Good blog — I learned a lot about payment by results. Funny thing is I couldn’t find anything about outcomes (except for 14.5 “best possible outcome….” just efficiencies - I assume that in the NHS one equates with the other. I have an observation about you’re rant though - every paragraph is about loss of control. When we (all) start in health care we have grat control - we’re dealing only with patients and when you do well, they generally do well (or at least appreciate you’re effort). The older we get, the more we manage HC (and try to make a bigger difference) the less control we have. Maybe it’s just perspective. I have less control of more things and I’m making a bigger difference. Blogs are also meant to poke the tiger and provide points to argue - so maybe that’s where the angre is coming from. Good read. Thanks. Ian.
http://www.waittimes.blogspot.com
Julie said,
March 30, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Many thanks for that Ian I think you are right about control vs making a difference. I also have no problem with people getting angry and having a good old rant, so long as they don’t lose perspective. Thanks for stopping by and reading my Blog.
mo said,
April 19, 2008 at 7:10 am
I really hated your comment to”ordinary nurses” to just do their jobs, you picked it blah blah blah.
No nurse picked the job that exists today. No nurse went through nursing school and was told “you will be responsible for ten to twenty patients, you will have no time to speak to any of them as you will be too be busy passing meds and doing dressing changes, trying to get everyone clean, everyone fed and keeping their families from hiring a lawyer, you will live in a permanent state of anxiety that you have forgotten something or someone because no human being can remember the nursing care plans for ten people who have not only an acute illness that brought them into hospital they also have three other chronic medical conditions that have to treated too, no one will have mentioned that it is now expected that a ward RN should be able to care for a patient who ten years ago would have been in the ICU with one to one care along with her other nine patients almost as sick and that this patient load will double any time someone goes to lunch”
No nurse was told you will be the target for all blame for everything that happens up to and including the quality of the food and the price of a tv rental.
If nursing students were told what was in wait for them we wouldn’t have any nurses.
It is arrogant and condescending to tell any nurse to just suck it up or go get a different job. It’s also rude.
I think every person within any hospital should worship at the feet of every damn nurse there. You are absolutely right…nurses CHOOSE the job and they can NOT choose it too.
And if this mistreatment continues nurses will do what you suggest and vote with their feet and then when you get sick you can hope one of your family or friends will be willing to feed you, turn you and clean up after your bowel movements while someone with a two week meds course and no other training gives you your drugs.
This mistreatment is actually why nurse practitioners are everywhere. They had enough of being treated like a slave class, they got sick of being beaten by psychotics and then being berated by their managers for provoking the assault.
I just love it when a nurse manages to escape the bedside and then has the bloody gall to get judgmental about the colleagues left behind.
Julie said,
April 19, 2008 at 8:29 am
With respect to your comments, I am talking about the comments people make on the internet about the work they have to do. I also have been an ordinary nurse, I have immense respect for the nurses I meet every day who are getting on with their work, but what I object to is the surprise some people express that they actually have to do work. I have come across more than one student, just about to qualify who wants to know how to become a specialist nurse in the quickest possible time. Everyone has to do their apprenticeship as it were. I am sorry you were offended by my comments, but I am not condescending any more than I am completely to blame for all bad decisions my organisation makes and plenty of people tell me that I am,