The gown card reads “In the day’s culture it is not enough just to practice nursing, you must also wear different hats.”
This is a bit of a tricky one. I wrote this gown card at a nursing symposium on November 6, 2015. I know because it is listed on the card. I also know because I remember that symposium. It was one of my first in shared governance. I wasn’t involved in the planning of this one, but I was expected, as the hospital chair, to be present and participate. The theme for this one was “Batter up.”
No, not really. But it was baseball-themed, coming less than a week after the end of the 2015 World Series.
There I was, in a very new environment, soaking up all the excitement of the speakers and my fellow shared governance chairs. I took copious notes. Three gown cards full. And I have bitty handwriting.
Something the keynote speaker must have said struck me. It was probably about having to do all the things and be all the departments after hours, as a nurse on the floor.
While I was probably not the only operating room nurse in the room, I was definitely the only OR nurse on the team.
This was when I started to advocate the OR nurse’s inclusion in all aspects of hospital life. I was the first OR nurse they had ever had on the hospital chair level of shared governance. I volunteered for other committees, so many committees, so that the OR could have a voice in all of these committees, and shared governance meetings.
Nurses have to wear many hats. This is true. We have to be our own unit secretary at times, we definitely have to function as a CNA at others, and we have to pinch hit for plant engineering when things go wrong and no one is available to sort out the problem. We also have to be able to figure out the computer charting and also how to troubleshoot when things don’t work the way they should. We have to be able to fix or find another route for a piece of equipment that is definitely older than our nursing career.
While we are doing all of that, we also have to take care of patients. We have to make sure that the bedbound is repositioned every two hours, that the diabetic gets a blood sugar taken before they eat, that morning and evening pass medications are given. And for those of us who do not work the floor unit life, we have to make sure that every surgical case goes as expected. That ALL the equipment that is needed is available and ready, and we also have to find a workable solution when there is a failure. Don’t forget about making sure the proper instrumentation is available and sterile for each surgery, and if there is an instrument that is dropped where to find a replacement instrument because you know that what hit the floor is the only one.
No one nurse is better or worse than another.
We all wear the hats.
We all wear all the hats.
But we are nurses first.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 