Will we ever get along?

Health care is increasingly becoming more of a team work, than a personal sport. Its not all about the doctor anymore, the physical therapist, social worker, nurses and even medical students are all vital parts of this team. Everybody has their own parts to play, the doctor ultimately makes decision about patient care but medical students have been known to take stellar histories and discover things about patients that the doctor or resident missed. Nurses are arguably the ones that spend the most time with the patients, and so could get to know the patient on a level that other team members cant.

However, one thing that I have noticed about nurses from my one year on rotations is that nurses notoriously don’t get along with medical students. Its like the Spartans and the xxx, Ife and Modakeke, Ruggedman and …

On my very first rotation, there was this nurse in the ED, we asked her for the key to the bathroom, and she gave my colleague a bunch of keys and highlighted one. We tried the key several times until I suggested we try others and after a few tries, we came up on the real key. The nurse was in a corner giggling to herself.

The nastiest nurses I’ve come across have been Ob nurses (nurses on Labor and Delivery) they always felt some sort of allegiance to their patients and almost made it their duty to keep the medical students away from the patients. I’m like “how am I supposed to learn if you wont let me interact with the patients!” These are the months where I’m supposed to learn stuff and when I come back as an intern, I would actually have an idea of what I’m doing.

Yeah, the nicest nurses I’ve encountered are the nurses on the medicine floors. They make you feel like part of the team. Some of them even refer to us as “doctor bumight” (yeah, such things are good for our egos J ) They would tell you everything about your patients such that it makes you look good on rounds. There have been cases like this

Medical student: “ excuse me, are u the nurse for Ms Shokolokobangoshe?’

Nurse; “yeah’

MS; “do you know if there was anything that happened with her overnight?”

Nurse: “nothing happened”

Then MS goes on rounds and reports that “in the past 24 hours, there were no acute events” only for the attending physician who was at home overnight to interject that “Nurse X told me that Ms Shokologobangoshe had a fever overnight, then her blood pressure tanked, and she was given IV fluids, and then she coded, so they had to run a code on her for 15 minutes before she was resuscitated”.

And MS is left looking like a fool! Not cool.

PS: I’m not anti-nurses o! I suspect that a good chunk of my readers (and fellow bloggers) are nurses. My mom is a nurse!

*Now preparing for the onslaught of nurses on me*

PS:

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