The gown card reads “We need to stop telling them what they want to hear.”
Everyone does this.
And I mean everyone.
You get into a difficult conversation with your boss and all of a sudden you are agreeing that why yes, the sky is red with blue polka dots (or whatever the corporate coloration is).
Yes, it is absolutely fine to have a double back position, this nurse can do it.
The nurse doesn’t need sleep.
Yes, it is absolutely okie-dokie to have tech ignore the break in sterile technique.
That’s what antibiotics are fore.
All in the name of getting on with the cases.
Of advancing the schedule.
And then when something that you told them would happen happens, all of a sudden they are clutching their pearls, wailing, “how did this happen?”
Because disagreement and dissent may not be wanted in the department.
I hear stories of other hospitals from my nurse and tech friends where the echo chamber is alive and well, as long as it suits the corporate gain.
The word you are looking for after an unreasonable request is “No.”
Now, I have had difficulties with this word in the past. But I have always said no, and meant it, if I didn’t want to do something.
Shoe horn a 45 minute surgery into a 38 minute hole in the schedule? Excuse me, but when a surgeon tells you it will only take 40 minutes, that is their time, not the time to clean the room, open the case, see the patient, prep the patient, get anesthesia involved, go to sleep, do the case, wake the patient up, and go to PACU time. So, no, the *fill in the blank* case will not be going into the small hole in the schedule. Your choice is after this case, after the end of cases for the day, or tomorrow. Choose wisely.
The point is that we as nurses do not always have to agree with what management wants, or what a surgeon wants.
Not if it is going to endanger the patients or ourselves.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 