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It’s Murphy’s Law—“If something can go wrong, it will”—as seen by nurses.
Perhaps some of these “oh Lordy I’ve been there” scenarios will sound familiar to you:
- You can please some of the patients all of the time, and all of the patients some of the time, but you just can’t please the family.
- Management truly believes you are overpaid. But they would never work for what they pay you.
- People farthest from your work area are the least needy—and least afraid of pushing the nurse call. Invariably.
- The more minor the injury, the more angry that person is for having to wait. Meanwhile, the little old guy with crushing chest pain says, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ve waited this long already….”
- Your patient is finally absorbing his NG feed after days of aspirating—but he pulls the tube out just before the consultant does his ward round.
- The number of staff to be found on the ward is inversely proportional to the scale of the emergency.
- You’ve just given a patient a meal—pie, roast potatoes and a sponge pudding with custard—when the consultant says the patient is ready for the operation.
- A very healthy patient, when admitted to a very small room, will require a vent, a cooling blanket, hemofilter, six pumps and a digital television before the end of your shift, requiring you to climb over the bed to get out of the room.
- The hospital always sends admissions to your nursing home at change of shift on your weekend on—the physician’s weekend off.
- The lift always breaks down when the 400-pound patient needs to be transferred from one bed to another.
you have the ONLY empty bed in “full house mode”, a co-worker said THE NAME of “everyone’s worse patient” OUT LOUD in an earlier conversation! Guess who admission’s calls as your new patient!
Those most in need of education on a new procedure or piece of equipment will disappear until the educator is gone. They will then take up an extraordinary amount of the time of those who attended the inservice, insisting on “help” learning the information. Management will never discipline those who dodged the inservice, but those who help the slackers will be disciplined for getting behind in their work.
Smokers will be permitted to take breaks as scheduled & will not be disciplined if they take double the time they are allotted. Nonsmokers will be forced to cover for smokers. Nonsmokers will be counseled for taking too much time documenting while smokers leave early, since they can’t document on care they didn’t give. Nonsmokers will be denied authorization for overtime pay on the basis that if they were competent & organized, they could have left on time.
When the IVDA needs a central line, they will invariably find a way to inject their substance of abuse into it, introducing infection. The nurse will be blamed for “not making sure the patient had no access to contraband,” the hospital will be blamed for the CL infection. Quality Improvement will force staff to attend education on prevention of CL infections due to JCAHO’s demands for action. Neither JCAHO nor the QI dept. will believe there is no way, with a nursing shortage, to prevent IVDAs from injecting drugs into a CL.
The full moon thing is FOR REAL!!!!!!