Hospital Staff Yelling at You

DCAPBLSTIC said:
I would guess as well Nursing is not what it used to be with the massive retiring age and demand for new nurses schools sometimes don't screen candidates to the full potential.
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?? :rolleyes:
 
DCAPBLSTIC said:
I would guess as well Nursing is not what it used to be with the massive retiring age and demand for new nurses schools sometimes don't screen candidates to the full potential.
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Massive retiring? Where?

In my neck of the woods, there is at least a year long waiting list to get into most nursing programs.....that's AFTER you show that you have all the pre-reqs.
 
Airlinepilotmedic said:
I work for a busy, mid-size, urban Fire Dept in Southern California. We have our own ALS ambulance transports, staffed with 2 FF/medics. On average 85% of our calls get transported to the same large county hospital. We are fortunate that our Dept Medical Director is also a senior fellow and attending physician at the same hospital. A few years back he implemented a once a year ride out program for all ED staff including RN, PA, MD ect...

The 12 hour ride out tremendously helped us build a closer cohesion, understanding and respect for each other. The ER MD, PA, and RN's gain a better understanding and respect for practicing in "the field" and how different and dynamic it can be. On the flip side we are able to pick their brains and find out what we can do on our end to make their jobs easier.

A few weeks back I had an anesthesiologist riding out with us on a CPR, I offered to let him get the tube, but since the guy was wedged in the back of a trailer with little light he politely declined. He joked afterword that he will stick to intubations in a well lit surgical suite. Conversely, he provided us with some great techniques to use on difficult airways.

Since the program was implemented we have had zero issues between ourselves and the ED staff. If anything it has helped us become better at our own jobs by opening the lines of communication so both ends are open to constructive criticism and creating an environment of being on the same team, compared to the us vs them mentality that used to be so prevalent.
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Excellent!!
 
Halothane said:
Massive retiring? Where?

In my neck of the woods, there is at least a year long waiting list to get into most nursing programs.....that's AFTER you show that you have all the pre-reqs.
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Nurses retiring from work doesn't equate to more slots and lowered prereqs in nursing schools.

Now, mandatory staffing ratios at hospitals do. Locally the major nurse employers got cozy with the schools and all sorts of ways to stuff people through were devised, including bridge courses for LVN's, being able to take you final one again if you failed it once (!!!), and classes to learn medical English as a second language for our many many nurses hired from overseas advertising.
 
mycrofft said:
Now, mandatory staffing ratios at hospitals do. Locally the major nurse employers got cozy with the schools and all sorts of ways to stuff people through were devised, including bridge courses for LVN's, being able to take you final one again if you failed it once (!!!), and classes to learn medical English as a second language for our many many nurses hired from overseas advertising.
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That's too bad. Luckily it isn't at all like that in most places.

California is in it's own little universe.
 
We're number 6! We're number 6!

(#6 economy in the world, according to some).
 
DCAPBLSTIC said:
I would guess as well Nursing is not what it used to be with the massive retiring age and demand for new nurses schools sometimes don't screen candidates to the full potential.
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Most of the paramedic schools around here had open slots such that the P school I wanted to go to as a backup to nursing school offered to get me into the Paramedic AAS program even though it was past the application deadline and 6 weeks until the start of the program. Basically, meet the prereqs (EMT, 1 year experience, IV, EKG), and you can pick your program whether it is cert or AAS.

Nursing schools are pretty much the polar opposite. My program had a 5% acceptance rate for qualified applicants (junior standing with prereqs, >3.0). The community colleges on standard admissions have 2-3 year waitlists for qualified applicants and the merit based programs have 25% acceptance rates (>2.5, prereqs, sophmore standing). The only places that have high acceptance rates are the shadier for-profit schools, but most of their grads are not working working in the ED... or the hospital. This is not a situation unique to certain areas, but is true across most areas. Though there are many highly qualified applicants applying to out of state schools in regions that were slightly less competitive. Even more top notch new grad RNs moved to North Dakota or west Texas to find their first hospital job.

In summary, in most of the country, there is no nursing shortage, only a shortage of some types of experienced specialty nurses. Nursing is an extremely competitive field both academically and in the job market.
 
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The main culprit for such unpleasant scenario is hospitals and nursing homes because they overburden nurses and doctors with extra work load to earn more money. Nurses become frustrated and loose temper when they find additional work on top of their existing overburden. The result is they forget the greatest quality of a noble nurse or doctor is - caring, calm, understanding, sympathetic, emotional stability, empathy for the pain and suffering of patients, ready to respond quickly to emergencies and other situations, and respecting people and rules.
 
You know, the overarching concern from the thread's title is why in a modern professional workplace are people yelling at anyone? Why don't or can't the subjects of this effectively complain? Why can't any valid complaints about patient care (the reason everyone gets to dress up and show up) be addressed systematically and not by taking someone into a corner and creating a hostile work environment?
 
I caught this vid while looking for food prepping videos.. I thought it was quite good. I don't think it just applies to the medical field.
Take it with a grain..

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGM9_BNR9jg[/YOUTUBE]
 
Household6 said:
I caught this vid while looking for food prepping videos.. I thought it was quite good. I don't think it just applies to the medical field.
Take it with a grain..

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGM9_BNR9jg[/YOUTUBE]
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I watched it and could sense her rage, wanted to giver her a hug. However, there was not a firm correlation between her observations (which I can verify many of) and why nurses act the way they do.

More simply put, staff at any level who try to bully or castigate you need to be led to their boss and told to repeat what they said in front of that person. I don't care that we use the occasional Latin or Greek, I just expect to be treated ok for my shift each and every shift.

Her stance of concealing mistakes, and other stances she espouses on the internet (e.g., tying the "vaxers" [people who give vaccinations] to autism)make me very wary of her in other respects. Sort of medical teaparrty stuff.
 
There has actually been a lot of research into why nurses "eat their young". I had to read a fair amount of it during my BSN program.

There are lots of contributing factors, and it is fairly interesting stuff from a sociological perspective, I guess. Plenty of hypotheses and complicated explanations out there.

What I think it comes down to is what we all know about women: groups of females often have a hard time getting along, and tend to make things tough for the new ones, especially if they are younger and prettier. FWIW, I have never seen a guy nurse have the problem of being "eaten", nor taking part in eating of other nurses.

And when it comes to ED nurses being rude, as I said before, that's largely just because the ED is really a lousy place to be 40+ hours a week. Burned out paramedics can be rather unpleasant, too.
 
Halothane said:
And when it comes to ED nurses being rude, as I said before, that's largely just because the ED is really a lousy place to be 40+ hours a week. Burned out paramedics can be rather unpleasant, too.
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I think this is an important point. Even from the possibly biased perspective of an exclusively pre-hospital provider, I see just as many examples of god-awful attitudes and behavior from EMS providers as I do ED nurses. Sometimes what we report as a "*****y nurse" is really just a nurse calling EMS out on piss poor care or actions without mincing words. This street goes both ways...
 
I've spent a lot of time working with RNs as a CNA, tech, and phlebotomist in addition to having to deal with them as an EMT. You think EMS gets treated like crap, work as a tech for a while. I used to float as a tech to many different units in a large hospital. As a tech coming on to "their" unit, I found some things to be almost universal.

Number 1 every nurse thinks their particular unit is the most overworked and underappreciated, even ones that were the easiest to work in the hospital. 2. The RNs were rarely helpful or friendly to the float techs, and were often borderline hostile. 3. Only if you work on that unit with the same RNs every day and generally do a good job(IE run your *** off all shift answering their call lights) will you gradually be accepted into their club.

Its a very cliquey environment, I swear when I work in a hospital I feel like im back in high school. The ER is probably the most cliquey of them all,(outside of the OR) with new people viewed as dangerous idiots until proven otherwise.
 
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hogwiley said:
Its a very cliquey environment, I swear when I work in a hospital I feel like im back in high school. The ER is probably the most cliquey of them all,(outside of the OR) with new people viewed as dangerous idiots until proven otherwise.
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Well, not to sound like I'm supporting providers "yelling" at other providers but, I would kinda expect and want someone to be viewed as dangerous until proven otherwise. Isn't that what the hypothetical FTO period is for EMS? You get to ride around with an experienced provider until you have proven that you are not dangerous and will not kill anybody when you go out and run calls on your own. The ER and the OR, especially, are probably the two places in the hospital where a provider's actions make a direct and quick acting distinction between life and death (well, maybe the ICU too). So, I would want and expect someone to be vetted and kinda tested before they are allowed to "join the group" if it means the difference between life and death.
 
I'll also add that during Paramedic clinicals, very few of the RNs have been genuinely helpful, and most pretty much ignore you. It has been a pretty frustrating experience, and getting clinical objectives and signatures has been an exercise in pleading, cajoling and pestering more than learning. The experience has been so overwhelmingly negative that I don't ever want to hear an RN at one of the hospitals I've been doing my time at EVER complain about a Paramedic again. Clinicals was their chance to correct problems they complain about and train us right, but that doesnt happened at all. All I can say is thank god for a field internship.

I also don't want to hear about how the RNs don't have time. When I worked as a tech I was pestered by student nurses many times, as were the RNs, and we were always helpful and polite(you could get written up if you did otherwise). RN students get the royal treatment compared to Paramedic students. It can be pretty annoying when you cant even access a patients chart to get some basic info, but you see an RN student being walked through and spoon fed everything by an RN preceptor.
 
My best clinical experience was at Tacoma General Hospital. They use paramedics in the emergency department, and most of those guys precept the paramedic students. It was really good learning experience. We all got to do a lot of procedures and ran the rapid response team.

As far as the nurses yelling at the paramedics, as I said before, it all comes down to respect. Most of the nurses in our hospitals here understand our protocols, and why we do what we do. There's very little of the "Us versus them" snarkiness. Of course, everybody has a bad day and that can make people edgy…
 
Halothane said:
There has actually been a lot of research into why nurses "eat their young". I had to read a fair amount of it during my BSN program.

There are lots of contributing factors, and it is fairly interesting stuff from a sociological perspective, I guess. Plenty of hypotheses and complicated explanations out there.

What I think it comes down to is what we all know about women: groups of females often have a hard time getting along, and tend to make things tough for the new ones, especially if they are younger and prettier. FWIW, I have never seen a guy nurse have the problem of being "eaten", nor taking part in eating of other nurses.

And when it comes to ED nurses being rude, as I said before, that's largely just because the ED is really a lousy place to be 40+ hours a week. Burned out paramedics can be rather unpleasant, too.
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I heartily agree with your end statement.

I always suspect anything which starts with "as we all know". Such as "We all know male nurses are really gay".

As an RN can attest to being a male nurse picked on by female instructors as well as female and male coworkers.
 
hogwiley - you have developed a very hardened attitude, and perhaps that is just the culture at your hospital, but if you don't think that it shines through and affects your interactions, you are fooling yourself.

MonkeyArrow said:
The ER and the OR, especially, are probably the two places in the hospital where a provider's actions make a direct and quick acting distinction between life and death (well, maybe the ICU too).
Click to expand...

*MAYBE* the ICU? :wacko:
 
Household6 said:
I caught this vid while looking for food prepping videos.. I thought it was quite good. I don't think it just applies to the medical field.

Take it with a grain..



[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGM9_BNR9jg[/YOUTUBE]
Click to expand...


Good video. Doing your part to prevent a workplace from becoming toxic is very important. It's hard to get it back.

Having joy about why you are doing the job can go a long way.
 
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