The phrases junior nurses and most staff do not care to hear from senior nurses…
…or the negativity they can spew…. “You wouldn’t know what to look for in that type of patient assessment anyways…” How do you know I don’t know what to assess…
Nurses Behaving Badly
A Nurse Contemplates Leaving the Profession
Dinner last night with an old friend who toils in the mines of Labour and Delivery. She has worked there for four years. She told me of an incident not…
The phrases junior nurses and most staff do not care to hear from senior nurses…
… and other examples of nurses eating their young… A few statements I’ve heard in the last few years that I shall share periodically. “It is more important that I…
Breastfeeding Makes Sane People Crazy
Why does any discussion of breastfeeding makes people a little insane? I don’t exclude myself: even I get a little agitated. Here are some examples of what I mean: Exhibit…
Arizona is Where Educating Patients is Bad, Bad, Bad: An Amanda Trujillo Update
Just a few words about Amanda Trujillo. Jennifer Olin at RNCentral.com has detailed at the latest twists and turns of her case. I won’t repeat everything, but I want to…
Scripting Nurses is Bad for Patient Care
This might be a new low in nursing management. Instead of actually providing caring, empathy and compassion, some hospitals would like nurses to provide a simulacrum of caring, empathy and…
Nursing Makes Nurses Less Empathetic
Irony alert! The best way to decrease empathy in nurses, apparently, is to actually practice nursing. A new study of nursing students found that as students gained more clinical exposure,…
Nurses are Like Howler Monkeys, Poo and All
When I was a young, inexperienced nurse, I quickly learned one lesson: the cliché that Emergency nurses are fabulously assertive, mouthy, in-your-face pitbulls is absolutely true. I don’t mean ED…
What the Amanda Trujillo Case Tells Me About Nurses Behaving Badly
Amanda Trujillo can take cold comfort that her situation is not unique. In the two years and odd months I have posted on this blog, I have written about six…
A Small Rant from Your Friendly X-ray Tech
A note sent to me from my favourite MRT (Medical Radiation Technologist). A reminder too, that nurses aren’t the centre of the universe, even if we think we are. Some…
Karma Sweet Karma
The latest instalment of Nurses Behaving Badly featured the night charge and the day charge (i.e. me) getting a status asthmaticus organized in Resus 1 a few minutes after shift…
What Nursing Leadership Doesn’t Look Like
A small, belated Christmas tale on how not to manage an emergency department. But first a few preliminary points of information. First: in Ontario, front line nurses are generally forbidden…
Under Construction
Meaning me, of course. I worked a (rare) Night 12 a few days ago. It was the usual dog’s breakfast of high acuity, walking wounded without end lining up at…
Death to PowerPoint and Other Notions
Back again.Yeah, I’ve been away for a while, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with writing or blogging. However my unintentional sabbatical has had the benefit of leaving…
On Allegations of Patient Abuse at St. Joseph’s
This story concerning alleged abuse of a senior at St. Joseph’s Health Care Centre (and yes, I know “alleged” is a weasel word) has been making the rounds in the…
In Which TorontoEmerg Discourses on Some Aspects of Human Nature
It’s probably more than little trite to say the Emergency Department is a microcosm or laboratory of humanity, but like most clichés it has an element of truth. We see…
A Letter to a Younger Colleague
Dear Colleague You are fairly new to our Emergency Department, you have done your Emergency Nursing courses and you now have collected a slew of certification initials: ACLS, PALS, TNCC,…
Shi(f)t Work
Wanderer over at Lost on the Floor makes a point: My manager remarked to me that night-shifters tend to, “have a bit of chip on our shoulders, almost like the…
So When Does This Become a Crisis?
I walked into the Emergency Department one hot morning a couple of weeks ago and found every last stretcher — twenty-five beds, including the two we try to reserve for…
Flattery Will Get You Everywhere
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Team TorontoEmerg. First, I’ve been working like a rented mule, and secondly, a colleague whom I trusted and respected sandbagged me with…