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RealityRN
Posts Tagged ‘Teamwork’
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Seasoned with Sage

I'm a school nurse; I left the ER behind: the stress, the shift work, the adrenaline. Now I work in an exclusive private boarding school in the European Alps. Naturally, like most affluent kids, they don't know how lucky they are.

One of the students told me the other day she wants to be a nurse. I asked her why, and she said she thought I [...]
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Reality Unscripted

Yesterday the doctor I work for was fuming. He was ticked that I messed up his schedule by adding a patient. After he snipped at me, he stormed off to see the patient, who had a bad leg infection.

The patient evaluation softened the doctor's mood. The guy obviously needed to be seen--and we finished the day right on time.

Apologetic and sheepish, the doc seemed to [...]
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Rookie Wit & Wisdom

We’ve heard about them—and maybe even worked with them: the cranky, power-trippy docs. The ones who don’t want to associate with nurses at all, and see them as sub-par professionals.

I work in Labor and Delivery--we do a lot of waiting for people to deliver, and the tendency is for nurses and doctors to segregate in two different areas. This seems to promote the idea that [...]
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Nurse Relationships
A look at nurse-to-nurse hostility and why it occurs.

A man walked past a few kids with a bucket of sea crabs. One of the crabs was crawling to the top of the bucket, so the man told the boys to get a lid. “Mister, you don’t know anything about crabs,” the boys said. “As soon as that crab gets to the top, the others will pull him right back down. Never fails.”

The expression [...]
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Seasoned with Sage

I often struggle to remember the good days at work. But the good outweighs the bad, otherwise I wouldn't still be a nurse. One of the more memorable, feel-good stories goes like this:

At 41, Mr. Jones was too young to need vascular surgery, especially since he wasn't diabetic, and as far as he was aware, he didn’t have a family history of circulation problems. But [...]
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Seasoned with Sage

I talked with one new nurse who said that 50% of the time she was really good at delegating. The other 50%?  She admitted, “I end up doing the task that a CNA should be doing—because I’m not strong enough to insist upon it. And then I beat myself up, because I realize I should have persisted. I wouldn’t fall behind on my work if [...]
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Reality Unscripted

I spent the better part of this afternoon helping my 9-year-old clean her room.

The term "pig sty" is fitting. She has avoided the task for weeks because it was simply overwhelming. I would have yelled more were I able to walk through the garage or guest room. The apple did not fall far from the disorganized tree.

Throughout the day, Kira kept saying, "This is so [...]
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Managing Your Career

Part one of a two-part exclusive interview with Sally Lemke, winner of the 2007 Super Star in Community Nursing award.

It’s a conundrum: How could the recipient of the VNA Foundation’s “SuperStar in Community Nursing Award”—a $25,000 prize—get the axe a mere few days later?

Sally Lemke, who was a nurse practitioner in Chicago’s Cook County healthcare system, became a local celebrity when this unthinkable scenario played [...]
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Reality Unscripted

In the last blog we established that if you're in a job you hate, you need to find another one. If you hate your job, how effective a nurse can you really be? That's the question I want to take a look at now.

Contrary to what my last entry may have sounded like, I believe in being a change agent for our profession. [...]
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Handling Stress
How new nurses can banish their negative self-talk.

Everyone has to work to stay positive. It’s human nature to focus on what went wrong. As a new nurse faced with situations that are terrifying and challenging, you have to work doubly hard at it.

All new nurses have been there: at a point of giving up because they’ve repeatedly told themselves they know nothing and will never get it all right. But you will. [...]
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