A Nurse with a Gun

Saturday, August 02, 2008

For Nursing Instructors

I love to teach. About a year ago, I wrote a treatise on nursing students and how they are frequently abused in the clinical portions of their learning. It explains how I really feel. I suggest you click the link and give it a read before proceeding here......

Now, I want to explain something to all nursing and scrub tech instructors. I reserve the right to send anyone out of a surgical suite, procedure or treatment room where I may be working. Period.

Make certain your students know how to behave. Tell them to turn off their cell phones and leave them at home. Text messaging is not an option. Tell them to talk little, listen much. Tell them to be respectful of my patients. Tell them to be respectful of my physicians. Tell them to be respectful of me. Tell them that if the case starts to go to shit, they are to back up against a bare wall or get out of the room. Tell them to stay out of the way. Tell them that if I instruct them to "Please leave the room," they are to do so. Right then, without looking back. Without argument. Period.

If I send your student out of the room, you are free to ask me why. Later. I will tell you exactly why. Do not complain to my boss. He will back me. To the hilt.

If you go sniveling to my boss about me asking your students to leave the damned room, then I understand the problem. You are the problem. You have failed to teach your students basic etiquette. I'm not surprised, as you fail to demonstrate it yourself. I am not here to teach your students. I am here to successfully run cases and keep these patients alive until I transfer them to another nurse able to do the same. You are here to teach your students. And you and your students can look in through the damned window and wonder what the hell is happening from now on.

That is all.

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Some years ago, I was in the first semester of nursing school. I had already gone through all the pre-nursing courses. I finished the semester with a B.
I never went back.
I never went back because our instuctors were in the process of changing/updating the course, and had little time for the students. The also would just not admit to ever being wrong (I was an active duty paramedic at the time, and I did spot errors) We read a lot of books, but when time for the clinicals came, we were left hanging. In fact, I never remember even seeing the instructors during clinicals. And, as a male, I sometimes wondered if my sex was a problem.

7:37 PM  
Blogger S.J.S. said...

Cool observations. I also checked out your "treatise on nursing students" post. When I was in nursing school, I worked part-time at a large hospital. One of the charge nurses would gather all the students (we were "techs" or "ass'ts") when there was an interesting procedure. She told me to not thank her, but be sure to do the same when I graduated and had students. "Each one teach one" she told me. I'm retired now, but I always followed that rule.


Michigan has a crisis in that there are very few hospitals that will allow psychiatric nursing clinicals. I'm proud that I worked in a facility that did our best to correct that problem.

7:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sohow was your day?

8:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Xavier, I am an educator and I feel the same way you do about students coming in to observe what I do. Though, admittedly, my job does not have the immediate life or death consequences that yours does. Etiquette is non existent these days, all we can do is model appropriate behavior/decision making and hope it makes an impact.

9:37 PM  

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