elitist attitudes

[nrddct]

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Okay, I've been reading about how some of you guys are going to become doctors and sacrifice basically your youth and still be able to respect people from all backgrounds (referring especially to the poor).

Well, I find this hard to do already and this thread is certainly not meant to demean anyone but my intent is to better myself and gain a more understanding perspective. Let me explain...

I work as a patient care tech to gain experience to a medical setting and I feel many of my co-workers are incompetent when it comes to making decisions about patient care. I see caretakers not listening to patient needs and just doing things in their ?own? way. While this may not be harmful enough to endanger patients lives, it certainly shows an ignorance and incompetence in understanding individuals have different needs. Most of the times the people that do what I do are from the inner city?not educated beyond high school and which I believe correlates to their attitude and behavior. For ex. A certain patient calls many times for help and eventually the staff just ignores this patient because they are too demanding. I go and see what this patient wants...listen to their complaint and try to fulfill their wishes. 9 out of 10 they just need someone who will listen but are ignored because of this individual need. Do I have this patience because I?m just more compassionate or because I understand more due to my education?

I find this ignorant attitude with the nurses too. They are even worse because they have this inferiority complex where they think because they went to 2 yrs of nursing school, they could talk down to me and order me around like a slave. I know that this comes with the territory due to my job description but what bugs me is that nurses get caught up in having to do things ?their? way and exist only in their little world. Don?t get me wrong, I like the patient care aspect of my job which includes everything from changing diapers, giving baths, feeding patients because being able to help people at such an elemental time in their life is what I find rewarding. However, I can?t ignore the elitist attitude that exists and don?t believe you guys who say when you become doctors your going to be an ?everyman.? Maybe I?m somewhat biased since I know what its like to be on the bottom of the hospital food chain. When you?re at the top everything is hunky-dory and you can believe and act how you want. My point stands that when you sacrifice so much of your life it is inevitable, no matter how genuine you are at the beginning, to develop an elitist attitude. For those who can I admire you because you are better than me.

Please enlighten me and share your thoughts? am I na?ve, cocky, just pulling these ideas out of my ass 😛 , whatever?I like constructive criticism.

 

[XCanadianRagwee]

Sorry I'll stop treating people like the peasants they are. I'll be better.

As for pateints being demanding by ringing the bell a zillion times. I shadowed my sister a few times (she's a nurse) and a couple of times there have been 'demanding" patients. Unfortunately, there are more pressing matters that need to be take care of, and other patients that need to be seen that she can't spend all 12 hours of her shift looking after that one patient. It's sad..but that's they way it is right now. She is one of the most patient people I know, but she does have to perform her job to the best of her abilities, and sometimes it invovles ignoring a demanding patient...Often if this is the case she tells them you can only ring the bell once per hour (or some other given time) so it better be a damn good excuse. If they're valid reasons then she'll be more than happy to offer her assistance. I think most nurses are this way as well.

 

[Street Philosopher]

People get burned out doing things that nurses do. When you've been working for years, hearing the same pleas from patients, you tend ignore the ones that are of the "please come listen to me" variety. Nurses, especially the ones at nursing homes, are busy and overworked. They don't have the luxury (or the motivation, strength) to do all the things they would have done when they started as idealists.

When I go to the nursing home to visit someone, my instinct is to help all the people that call me, even though I'm a stranger to them, and someone who doesn't even work there. And so I do, and feel good about myself, and wonder why other nurses don't do the same. But I've only been there for about 30 minutes max; the nurses work there everyday. It's a little different.

I don't know how long you've been working there, so I'm not going to make assumptions. This is just my personal experience.

 

[AJM]

This attitude that you're noticing is highly unlikely an elitist one, but just a reflection of how busy hospital workers really are. At your stage, you probably have the patience to sit and listen to the patients that are ringing the call button every 5 minutes because you actually have time to do that. Nurses can't pay that kind of attention to a single patient, or else they will be neglecting their other 4 or 5 patients, some of whom may be very sick and truly need their attention. Now granted, some nurses are better than others about this, and you will always run across a bitter nurse who ignores everyone -- in my experience, this is definitely the vast minority of nurses. You just notice them more because their attitude will bother you.

The rigid nurses you describe I also doubt are being elitist. They probably have been doing their job for the last 5-20 years, and they have their system down pat. The last thing they want is some kid walking off the street (no offense) changing around their whole system of how they work that they've been doing for years. So instead, they expect you to conform to their needs so that they can continue to do their work efficiently while you are helping them out. Hardly elitist in my book, just practical. (Again, there will always be the exceptions of the plain old mean nurses)

Believe me, for a physician working in a hospital, things are most certainly not "hunky-dory". Physicians (yes, even attendings) usually have more responsibilities and are pulled in more directions than nurses. As an intern, I need to prioritize my patients, so that the sicker ones end up getting more attention. I can't afford to spend all of my time comforting my relatively well but demanding patients while I have 2 other patients on another floor crumping. And you can't expect a physician to go see a patient every single time the patient has their physician paged -- just too much else to take care of. Believe me, I would love to be able to sit and listen to every one of my patients every day, but as residents and even attendings, we carry such high patient loads that it is completely unrealistic to expect to do that. Again, while from the outside it might be interpreted as elitism, what you might not be noticing are the pressures on the physicians and nurses in their everyday work.

There are elitists in every field, and they are present in medicine as well. But what I am hearing you describe is just a bunch of very busy health professionals.

 

[kcrd]

Another thing is that many patients don't realize that nurses are trained health professionals - many with 4+ years of training. They are not there to be at the beck-and-call of patients who want juice, extra pillows, and other non-medical requests. I've seen patients act like they are staying in luxury hotels, with nurses as their servants. That would be enough for me to develop an 'attitude.'

 

[chibihamsta]

I don't have any major complaints about nurses. But I agree with the first poster on this thread.. it's the nurse's assistants and care takers that I've worked with that I consistently see people slacking off on the job. I don't care how long they've been working in a place, they still get paid to do their job and they should at least put some effort into it.

Onto another topic, I was watching the Animal Planet channel one night and the animal police people were catching this woman who abused her dog, letting ticks grow thick and fat over the entire surface of the dog. The dog barely had any blood left in its body and was shivering like crazy. It took a team of vets hours to pull every single juicy tick off that dog. It turned out that this lady was a caretaker at a nursing home. She defended herself by saying, "I didn't notice anything wrong with the dog." If she can't even take care of her dog, what in the h**l kind of caregiver was she? I hope she never gets her job back!

 

[HeWhoExists]

I worked in a nursing home for over a year and saw for myself some of the attitudes described in here. Some of the aides really are callous and negligent and sit around chatting at the nurses' station while there's lights going off all over their halls, but it's also difficult to keep up with every patient's needs as well. More often than not I came home from work feeling incompetent and incapable because, even with the best of intentions, it was not humanly possible to handle every thing that came up. When you have 15 patients and 8 hours to do your work in, you can only spend 35 min per patient. That's the mathematics of the nursing home. The mathematics of neglect. You do the essentials and do what else you can and then leave a decent setup for the next shift.
My experience with nurses was pretty good. I thought they operated on a more humane level. Nearly all of them have been aides before getting their LPN, and know the brutal nature of the work. But answering every light is not their immediate job, that's what the aides are for. Nurses do their med rounds and wound care and tons of paperwork.
Oh yeah, and I could not help my, at the time, elitist feelings towards these people. Looking back I don't know how I justified it to myself, often my work was not much better then theirs, mechanically speaking.

 

[abw]

Hey!

I've seen both sides of this as well. In one example, I was just in the hospital as a patient recently, and I hear someone from another room screaming "help" about every 5-10 seconds. This went on for a minute or so then she started screaming "help - i can't breathe!". No one was paying attention even though no one seemed to be busy. I was ready to go out myself and see what was wrong, but then the nurse stoped me and said that they were trying to teach the lady a lesson. Apparently she needed to wear an oxygen mask for x amount of time before some sort of procedure (didn't get specifics) and even though she couldn't breathe well without it, it was uncomfortable so she kept taking it off. The nurse said that if she's short of breath for a while eventually she'll learn not to take it off.

On the other hand, my dad had a customer (he's not even in a medical field - he's her stockbroker!) who would call him everytime the nurse wouldn't respond to her. Once she got our answering machine instead of my dad, so she called 911 from her hospital bed because she couldn't get a nurse to bring her water. She did this round the clock - and during her last few months, there wasn't a night that he slept straight through.

Then when I do public health work, I see how many people in clinics get slighted because there aren't any/enough translators and people are just to busy to get full consent - which is ethically wrong.

I have no clue how I would handle the spectrum of this, and can only guess I'll learn with time and following my heart. Some of it's the system, some is the individual, but all could use change. I read "Complications" and was very interested in the part about how much of decisions should be made by a doctor and how much should be made by patients. Although it doesn't cover this topic completely, it does give you a bit to think about for how much you'll listen to your patient's complaint as well as how doctors get patients to see things their way. If you haven't read this book I'd highly recommend it.

 

[nrddct]

I love the respondes guys!

abw, the title is called "complications"? What other books are recommended?

I could not help my, at the time, elitist feelings towards these people

This is exactly how I feel. I feel there is a difference between how I treat patient. I try to place myself in there position and offer my empathy in there time of need. I guess this elitest feeling is to be expected because it requires a special person to truly understand and care about a strangers life. This includes all the premeds out there. However, after reading the respondes I feel that I'm kinda isolating myself from my coworkers. I mean working in a hospital requires teamwork, and I understand where nurses are coming from. The nurses aides however...

Anyways lets have more posts like this instead of the typical who got in where 🙄

Great discussion guys lets hear more thoughts.

 

[abw]

Hey!

Yep, the book is called "Complications" by Atul Gawande. It's really good and pretty quick moving - I got through it in a weekend. He speaks from a surgeon's perspective, but even if you're not considering surgery it's worth reading for the topics he discusses - what makes a good doctor go bad (and the mental health of doctors), the human/erring side to medicine, the "who should make decisions for patients" debate, and the what to do when you don't know what to do problem.

 

[JM.]

I also read that book, it was very good.

 

[Iffy premed]

Whoever said that he/she wanted to be an "everyman" when he/she is a doctor...NOT ME. All I want is to communicate effectively, convey compassion and sympathy...NOT to cater to everyone's whim. I am not going into 100K debt just to be able to listen to some whine. Pay someone else to do that, it is not in the doctor's job description.

Also...if the doctors and nurses took care of everything...some people would be out of a job by now. So instead of criticizing, be thankful that there is enough jobs to go around right now, esp in this economy!