Tuesday PSA: Buzzy Learns About Careers in Nursing!
We’re in the middle of National Nursing Week and I’ve been saving this Careers in Nursing public service ad for just such an occasion.
I’ve always made it a point to get along well with nurses. They’re fellow medical professionals, and as a physician, they can make your life easy, or they can make it a living hell. Personally, I always preferred easy — and it always just seemed common sense to never antagonize the nursing staff.
Here’s a quick true story from residency to prove my point: As a first-year resident, we spent a month working in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit). When we were the NICU resident on call, one of our responsibilities was to manage the ventilators many of the newborns were hooked up to. (It was a big hospital, with probably 30 to 40 babies at any given time, with at least half of them intubated and on the ventilator.) To do this, a lab known as a blood gas would be drawn, and based on the results, you’d adjust the ventilator settings. This probably occurred forty times during a night of call. Generally, the nurses were very helpful and would wait until they had about a dozen blood gas results before giving you a call. This was to allow you time to catch some sleep in the call room.
However, one of my fellow residents did something that annoyed the nursing staff, and then when called on it, acted very arrogantly. This was not a good idea. In retaliation, when it was his night to be on call, they would page him every single time a blood gas came back instead of holding on to the resultsand calling every few hours. In eight hours of call, he would receive forty pages (or about one every twelve minutes) from the nursing staff alone. The poor idiot never got any sleep on call. Sadly, I don’t think he learned his lesson, and continued to have problems with the nursing staff all the way through residency.
This PSA appeared in DC comics from April 1957. The script is by Jack Schiff and the art is by Ruben Moreira.
More PSAs
May 12th, 2010 at 4:39 am
I love to “educate” young doctors :-D every single one learns the lesson :-D
Some easy, some take the hard way.
Never ever make a ICU nurse angry.
May 12th, 2010 at 7:34 am
This is only vaguely related, but my uncle has been a nurse since the seventies. Is it true that male nurses got/get less respect?
May 12th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
… a nurse who specializes in men?? I’ve never heard of that. Is he some kind of urological nurse or something?
And I guess what the LPN was in the comic is more of a CNA today, and now our nurses come in flavors of RN vs. BSN.
There are so many different types of healthcare workers, it’s so hard to keep track.
May 12th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
I think I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but as both a veteran and a former hospital worker, I always thought of the nurses as the NCOs: the Chief Petty Officers who keep things running for the doctors/officers — and a SMART officer NEVER gets on the wrong side of his NCO.
Me? I was a non-rated Seaman in the Coast Guard, and in the hospital, I pushed gurneys — so I was pretty much in the same role in both places.
I guess you could round things out by drawing a parallel between the X-Ray Techs, phlebotomists, and other assorted technicians and the rated Petty Officers who perform similarly-specialized technical tasks in the service.
(This is a surprisingly durable metaphor.)
And finally, another entry in “modern equivalent of LPN:” in the ’80s, when my mom went back to school, they called her two-year degree the “Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN)”.
May 13th, 2010 at 4:10 am
“Care of men” sounds a little bit like that old Tom Lehrer line: “He specialized in diseases of the rich.”
May 13th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I suspect that this is more of a nod to mores of the day. I mean, what woman would feel comfortable with a male nurse giving her a sponge bath? Or what man would… never mind.
But still, I could easily see male nurses being called in for various tasks that a male patient might find embarrassing for a female nurse to administer.
June 27th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
“And I guess what the LPN was in the comic is more of a CNA today, and now our nurses come in flavors of RN vs. BSN.”
…and NP. Also, aren’t some nurses LPNs even today?
“I suspect that this is more of a nod to mores of the day. I mean, what woman would feel comfortable with a male nurse giving her a sponge bath? Or what man would… never mind.
“But still, I could easily see male nurses being called in for various tasks that a male patient might find embarrassing for a female nurse to administer.”
Good points!
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