Funny how I haven’t used that term since Kelly left us. Hmm, Kelly was a fantastic nurse and friend, but that’s a story for another day.

I know it’s been a few days since I’ve blogged and I apologize for that. Unfortunately, sometimes life comes up and hits you right in the face regardless of how well prepared you are, you are not. In this case, I was not. I’ve spent the past few days organizing the castle, no that’s not a euphemism for something else, organizing things and massive itching is traits of mine when I’m stressed. I’m not sure if I’d really call it stress or just a shift from what I didn’t expect to what I expected to happen at the new job. When I started the new position, I expected to be reasonably busy all the time. Initially, this didn’t turn out to be the case, and I spent a lot of downtime which allowed me to be a little more prolific about this. Now that things have picked up my mind is now saying, “oh just leave me alone.” I am however, picking things up and continuing on.  The pod cast is somewhere out there and I will be pulling that together soon (read next couple days).

I guess it gives me a new appreciation for “how the other half lives.” I know as a floor nurse I quite frequently would have to defer to a physician for orders or advice. It also seems that floor nursing has gotten so screwed up that we have to ask the doctor if it’s okay if we do nursing tasks. I think this goes back to that crazy hospital culture that I was talking about in my last post, in that nurses are risk managed to death. I’m going to be honest with you I can be a super huge control freak, but writing orders for bathing seem to be a bit much. Yes, you heard me bathing. At 2 AM, the phone call went, “Mr. Jones would like to bathe but weren’t sure if he should.” My somewhat flip response was, “yes I can smell him from here that might be a good idea.” Thankfully some nurses get my sense of humor as did this one. I think staff nurses get so beaten down by micromanaging doctors that have no clue what a nurse does. I know everyone has seen House, Grey’s Anatomy, or insert any television doctor show here. Contrary to popular belief doctors and residents do not ambulate patients, start IVs, reposition patients, or any task that they feel is beneath them. The bottom line here is I spent a great deal of time since I started this position empowering my fellow nurses to make their own decisions. This is not to say that they change orders or prescribe, but calling me for every little road bump is not necessary.

Along these lines, House Bill 336 in Utah has made it to a full vote of the house. This is a bill that would grant full practice authority to nurse practitioners essentially taking away the supervision requirement for the first two years. While the bill passed committee quite handily, the Utah medical Association or UMA has reared its ugly little head started their elitist argument against. I fully understand and have been lectured for “hours” about the number of “years” of schooling that doctors have with I supposedly don’t. I’ll speak slowly because I know you don’t read fast, apparently; To have your Masters in nursing, you need to have a bachelor’s degree in nursing which is four years of school, attended approximately 2 ½ to three additional years to achieve your Masters. Okay, that’s seven years by my book. In the nurse practitioner track four semesters of clinical as a nurse practitioner in addition to however many years of experience you have as a staff nurse. Granted the roles are different but any staff nurse having twenty years of experience knows a thing or two about the body and can usually take a pretty good guess what’s going on. They’ve also seen many different providers approaches to dealing with a particular cluster of symptoms. Okay, I don’t have three years of residency after I graduate where I get to practice being a doctor, that’s the only difference. The other difference I have and they don’t is that I have a firm understanding of the daily nature patient care and understand things that are abnormal with the patient versus baseline. All boring I know; however, every nurse reading this blog is chuckling along and saying “preach.”

The bottom line is everybody has a job in medicine, and everyone should do their job in medicine. No one position from a housekeeper up to the CEO of the hospital has any superiority and if you don’t believe that tell me the last time you saw doctor clean up vomit. Nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants were created to help with the diagnostic load of physicians. Doesn’t mean you’re any better than us doesn’t say you’re somehow scum of the earth means you’re there.

 

I’m sure the doctors are organizing their underlings, with pitchforks and torches storming the castle, so I best boil some oil.