Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The Do's and Don'ts of Retaining Nurses

1. Do remind your new orientee that Grey's Anatomy is not even close to reality and they can not expect some special attention in a linen room.
2. Do use spoonfuls of Preparation H on your stress lines so that she doesn't notice your years of wrinkles and near panic attacks.
3. Do not react when she tells you that she is over-whelmed, after all, it's too early in her nursing career to be burnt out. She has to earn it, just like you did.
4. Do not introduce her as a "new" nurse, since patients are taking notes and waiting for a good malpractice suite so they can live in a mansion on supposedly negligence.
5. Do encourage her to get malpractice insurance. Tell her that she really doesn't need it, since the hospital will back her up 99% in most cases, but that she should have a little cushion for possible loop-holes in that unfortunate 1%.
6. Don't rush her when she feels that she needs to spend time with a particular patient, just let her go and do it now, because the time will come when she will have to decide that emotional support is just one more thing to do and she won't have the time.
7. Do not show any outward signs of negativity toward the nurse-patient ratio. Just keep taking the new patients and pretend that you can handle it, this is where your acting skills will come in handy. We do recommend that you take a class in acting before you precept.
8. Don't scold her for attempting to look up 30 different pills that one patient takes. You and I both know that there is no way in Sam Hill that all those pills did what they were supposed to do, let alone, went to the right place, thus making medication information wasted knowledge.
9. Do not tell her that time is her enemy or that someone is on Mission Impossible to make her job take 10X longer than it used to. She will discover this on her own eventually.
10. Do tell her to check her patient's lab work early, the ones the doctor ordered. Don't make her think that he should look this up himself, which may give him special linen closet time.
11. Do tell her to save her cell phone minutes for work and to hide her slim jim in her pocket. Tell her that no one will notice her bright pink phone up to her ear, which must be acceptable conduct.
12. Don't be too hard on her when she wears bright multi colored clogs that blend in with her denim uniform pants. After all, she did order them from a nursing catalog. Nurses somewhere must wear them.
13. Do not notice when she sings the whole chorus of God Bless America when she washes her hands instead of Happy Birthday. She learned this in Nursing 101. Just give her a large bottle of lotion and hope her skin doesn't get eaten off by the hospital soap.
14. Do not play down the over-rated demand for pain medication, since the more drugged her patient is, the less likely they are to use their call light.
15. Don't let her get frustrated with the MARS (meds). Eventually, the CIA will not be able to crack the code to get a Tylenol. Tell her that if she can not get a med from the pixis, this is a guarantee that she will not make a med error.
16. Do whisper in her ear that if she quits, you will kill her. That should give her enough of a reason to stay.

2 comments:

  1. Have seen them come and go just like a revolving door.Do not attemt to tell the new hire(nurse)you are working on her team for the shift.The word team may send her into a tizzy,that mean you may need to know where she will be hanging out in case a patient need her for something.That blue light that keeps blinking in her pocket blinks so often,you may think you are in K-Mart.Good bed side manners,may consist of spending a few minutes explaining why she the (nurse) is late bringing the pill at two o'clock that should have been there at midnight.The hand washing,smile and hello will come later.I do hope that when these new nurses are hired they all be married or settled with a mate,because there is really not enough time to take care of patients and hang out on smoke breaks and plan for a dating game.For every compasionate nurse I've met,there's at least four"just using their time to make some money".I hear was is being said and beleive it or not the patients hear it also.Open doors,loud voices in the hall is sometimes out of control.To say quitely to the most qualified nurse that her voice is a little loud,you may be in for a sermon about the amount of years she went to college and her score average and where she was born(which have nothing to do with toning down her voice).Thanks to the ones that are doing a good job.When you meet the new hire you can tell by your first meeting if working with her will be on a team level or trying to figure who is working for whom.Team work was a big problem where I was working.Hope things are changing for the better.Loving and caring,sharing,will always be part of me.So am I all that and a bag of chips.Absolutely not,just one that try to shine a little light hoping it will brighten their way.Many people asked me why I never became a nurse(some sincere and some being mean).I liked the hands on care that was sometimes really needed.

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  2. Wow loveable Ellie, That was powerful.

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