The Nurse Practitioner’s Place

After reading Kim’s post at Emergiblog regarding this subject , I decided to rehash an old entry of mine about the same issue. This is a very important issue in healthcare because it involves the care of patients. A nurse who can communicate to NPs and doctors well can save a life. Many times it’s like crying wolf. If a doctor has been called with “stupid stuff” too many times, they won’t listen to the important things.

April 2005
Recently, I attended a meeting at our hospital and one of the discussions was “preparing yourself to call a doctor on the telephone..” (A dreaded thing to most nurses.) I have had varying successes in this endeavor. The obvious problem is calling unprepared with all of the important information in front of you. Nothing is worse than being called from a patient’s room in the office to try and give orders to an unprepared nurse. So, I decided to try and come up with a plan for new nurses and some veterans in order to ease this tension…

Ask a veteran nurse (after explaining the details of the problem) whether or not it’s worth a call to the doctor. Use other’s expertise!!! Often, we have already seen this problem many times before and can tell you what to do first.

Try my new acrynoym.. GYST (pronounced jist… which stands for “Get Your Shit Together… this of course means… a current set of vitals, the chart, a list of current medications, exact symptoms, etc…
Nothing is more irritating to a health professional than getting called out of a room to try and answer a question about a patient with little or no pertinent information. Being called out multiple times is some of what increases your wait time in the waiting room.

According to the studies, they say you have about 7 seconds to hold a person’s attention, which means about 5 for medical professionals. We have very short attention spans and rarely tolerate wasted time. This is due to having to juggle several physical and mental tasks at one time.

I have been hung up on numerous times as a nurse. This is extremely rude by the doctor. My solution is to call them right back and say “I know we must have been disconnected because I know that you didn’t deliberately hang up on me..” This often jolts some professionalism back into play.. If not, I let it roll off my back. I don’t take things personally unless a doctor deliberately makes a personal attack.

To sum things up; please make sure that you are prepared when calling health professionals. It makes things easier all around. It also helps keep our standards of professionalism higher in the doctor’s eyes. It’s hard enough out here to care for patients with the workload without the battles between the caregivers..

Carry on troops!!!

I’m sorry.. I know people aren’t supposed to toot their own horns but…

I got my final grades today for the semester and by the skin of my teeth made A’s in both classes. I’m so glad this semester is over! I get to pleasure read for a few weeks. A little relaxing time, justly deserved.

NOT!

Now I have an abscessed wisdom tooth! ARGH!!!! At least it waited to flare up until my finals were over. I can’t get it pulled until the 21rst and am on antibiotics in order to get the horrible pain in my jaw to subside a tiny bit..

Sometimes I wish that I could just pull them all out and get plates. My mother lost her teeth early to a gum infection when she was about 40. She said that she never regrets having dentures. I don’t like the color of my teeth and have said that as a graduation present to myself would be to get them whiter and more healthy.

I HATE going to the dentist. It’s a white knuckle ride for me every time. I had a horrible experience as a child and it scarred me for life. 4 molar fillings with NO anesthesia, not even a shot of novacaine. Talk about torture! The assistant told me that if I cried that she would slap me! I told me mother about it after we left the office and I didn’t go back to the dentist until I became an adult. I had to take Halcion in order to get a root canal.

Now that’s good stuff! The dentist told me that I wouldn’t remember even being in the office. I didn’t remember a thing until my husband pulled me out of the car into the house. My children all stood by guffawing while one of my legs drug behind me like a drunken sailor. My oldest son called and I don’t remember what we talked about but it must have been hilarious.

I am on the waiting list for Tuesday in case someone chickens out (oops.. I mean cancels an appointment).. Wish me luck!

I just took my Pharm final today and was aggravated by all of the questions that should have been on the OTHER test.. They weren’t pharmacology questions!!
Word of advice to instructors out there… STICK TO THE SUBJECT OF THE TEST!!!!
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Off to take the APN 1 test and I’m SURE that I will see Pharm questions mixed into it as well….