Alright, as a nurse who will soon enough be a doc
I will be straight up honest on both sides of the fence.
There are some things that do not need to be told to nurses, like if a person has had chemo and starts to run a fever, it may indicate an infection (duh) which may mean that the white blood count is low from chemo therapy..you know stuff like that. But I do find, and it does irritate me, that at work there are some nurses who are know-it-alls....like "I dont know why Dr. Z did this, that doesn't make sense, it is stupid"----well it is probably because you haven't had the more indepth education is pathophysiology to know the regimen. Now, don't get me wrong, and don't be fooled--nurses are educated into pathophysiology of diseases, if they weren't they would be incompetent to monitor patients in the hospital in regards to signs and symptoms (although you will find some that you would question how they ever passed their boards, but by the same token you have that with docs too) but some "think" they know just as much but the fact is they don't know as much as the docs. The docs do, however, rely on the nurses assessment since they are with the patients a whole lot more at the hospital when having to treat something over the phone. I don't work at a teaching hospital, but I have been told by the docs I know that, in general, nurses know more than a 1st year intern.
And yes, there are docs that have superiority complexes, but nurses and other docs as well don't like these types. You will hear both docs and nurses talk about them and how they think they are "God."
You do also get some docs who expect nurses to know just as much as them too. For example, I had this one patient who had a very high potassium level. Potassium is excreted in feces and so a med was ordered to cause diarrhea and consequently potassium to be excreted along with it. Well, high potassium can cause cardiac dysrhythmias that can ultimately result in death. When the patient kept throwing up this med, this meant the patient's potassium level was not going to go down. So after about 4 hours of trying to get this med down but couldn't, I called the doc not knowing if the patients potassium level was still creeping upward and didn't know how much
of a danger this particular patient was in cardiac-wise. I didn't know when the
the doc was going to make rounds so I thought I'd give her a call, after all, I would hate not to call and have this patient code because of a hight potassium. The doc told me, "This can wait until I come up to the floor in an hour." But said it irritatingly. When she got to the floor, I said, "Dr. X, I do not know how high this potassium can be unresolved for this patient without this patient experiencing dysrhythmias, so I called not knowing whether or not it could wait...I would rather be safe than sorry that I didn't call." She apologized. This is just one example, there are others.
Anyway, just offered this for more insight.
