Until you walk a mile in their shoes
I have spent the majority of my 7 months (roughly 600+ hours) of nursing school in one clinical setting. I have begun to grasp the ins and outs of the unit where I will hopefully have a job once I graduate and pass the boards. I enjoy the hard work and crazies co-workers that I seem to spend most of the time with on the unit. Have I mentioned that I am completing my clinicals in a teaching hospital? We get all walks of students coming through the unit at various stages in their education, RT, PT, OT, surgery techs, radiology etc. We have other nursing schools in town that also show up since it is a highly specialized unit. Yes, I am blessed (read lucky) to be a part of the unit where I am completing my clinicals. My coach recently told me that I was an exception but not exceptional so as to not let anything go to my pipsqueak head. The point I am trying to make is that recently a couple of nursing students from another school decided to pass a complaint to their director about our unit. You have the where-with-all to complain about whether we are conducting ourselves professionally on our unit?! You spend your measly 4 to 6 hour rotation on our unit looking like a deer caught in headlights, twiddling your thumbs which I find very disturbing considering most of the nursing students that come through our unit are in their last rotations prior to graduation. First and foremost – SHUT YOUR FREAKIN’ PIE HOLE, MORONS!! You would think that they might be a bit more assertive in their want to assist in care. You would think that they might have learned through nursing school that experience outweighs observation. I know our unit can be somewhat intimidating due to the illness, disease and injuries we care for and I understand that first impressions are paramount but you absolutely cannot base your observations of a unit in that amount of time. I have yet to meet any nurse on the unit not willing to teach a student if the show a smidgen of interest. To survive on our unit, or any unit for that matter, you have to have a sense of humor or you might as well place us all in the padded cells with some of our patients. If humor is unprofessional, then I am unfit to be a nurse.
