Hey gang, hope prac is going well
In my placements so far i have been lucky enough to be working with very friendly,helpful and knowledgable nurses. On placement at the moment i had my first bad experience with a nurse.
A dependent patient was to be hoisted from their recliner chair into bed following a PT session. Another physio student and I returned the patient to the room and we saw the nurse was busy so we volunteered to hoist the patient back into bed. It was something that i have not come across in my previous placements or been exposed to at uni but at placement we had a brief introduction to hoists and how to use them. Therefore, we proceeded to place the material underneath the patient and then hoist the patient back into bed. When we placed her down the patient was slightly off centre in the bed and the nurse stormed over and proceeded to abuse both of us for the transfer and address us in a derogatory manner. She labelled us "bad physios" and "not to let physios do a nurses job"and was confrontational for the rest of the week.
My initial reaction was one of anger as i thought we had done quite well for something that was essentially new to both of us as the patient was hoisted safely back to bed but just needed some simple realignment. Thus, my instinct in this case was to become confrontational as i felt there was no need for her to criticise us.
Taking a deep breath i did what i needed to do to realign the patient and then once she was stable left the room without saying anything to the nurse. I knew the right thing to do was to maintain a professional demeanour as becoming confrontational would only ignite the situtation and not be of benefit to anyone involved.
This type of situtation is something i have learnt a lot from. I know now that if something similar happens in the future the best way is to maintain your cool and deal with the situation at hand.
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4 comments:
Wow what a situation to find yourself in. Sounds like you did a fantastic job at keeping your cool as it would be difficult not to become confrontational. I have found during hospital based placements nurses can have a huge influence on enjoyment levels and it is always best to keep them on side. It sounds like you handled the situation very well.
Very good anger management! On one particular prac I felt very intimidated by the nurses, doctors and med students. This is not to say its an us Vs them but at every other prac,m they were appreciative to have an extra set of hands. This particular one though, it seemed so long ago they too were students and still learning.. though some of them new grads! We had a similar situation using an F&P where we wanted to mobilise a patient and were wondering if we coukld disconnect the patient for the short while we did, we just wanted to "check with their nurse" and eneded up getting a blast from the ward clark that it is our decision when really we were just trying to do the right thing, and not be students who rock on in and act like they own the place. we notified our clinical tutor and she said they shouldnt treat us like that and if it happened again we could either approach them, or her and just have a quiet work... as the main man Bob Marley would say..
"get up, stand up... stand up for your right"
I think good on you for having a go of something you werent confident with to help someone out!
I suppose when you think about it nurses are there all the time and they probably do get sick of different students coming in and out every four weeks. But she should probably have been a little more grateful that you offered your help where other people would have just walked past and ignored it. I agree with Tracey though that you definately need to stay in the good books with nurses as much as you can!
Had a couple of hospital based placements and I have never had such problems fortunately.
Last two weeks I and another student faced to use hoist for patients' transfer several times and all the nurses were so helpful to teach us how to use it and put patients into their beds together. A couple of times we offered nurses for help and they were quite happy for extra hands.
I have several friends as a nurse, and they state so many Curtin physio students come and go in short period of time, but they always appreciate extra hands as short staff.
So I have never thought about nurses labelling us like this. I think you managed well in the situation.
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