Saturday, March 04, 2006

Subordinates

The people "beneath" a nurse in the hospital are nursing assisstants. In my particular unit, they are called "burn techs." Essentially, they assist in whatever I might need - from getting blood products, helping with dressing changes and linen changes, doing EKGs, Blood Sugars, etc, etc. They are not allowed to say "no," especially if they aren't doing anything.

There seems to be this whole attitude of burn techs thinking that they don't have to do everything/anything the nurse says because a) it won't get them fired, and b) they're super lazy and fat. It's really exhausting to have to remind the techs to do something over and over again, just to get snide and arrogant remarks. Of course I can do all these things myself, but I'm busy with other things which actually are critical in the life/death course of the patient.

Well today, I stood my ground. I made a stand. I am a change agent. Do you know what I did? I told on them.

Sounds silly, but that's actually what you're supposed to do. It probably won't do anything, but at least I did something, right?

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