The glory of working all night shifts is "night shift rules". no admin folks around means I can eat and drink where ever I want, leave my vocera in the charger where it belongs, and retriage within the rack to see the sickest folks first. and if some frequent flyer needs a therapeutic wait for their 10th visit this week, they get it.
Nice save. Humanity is thankful.
Amen to that. Any job where you can't eat or deal with basic bodily functions on a regular basis is madness (short of extremes like active combat, being an astronaut deployed in a space pod, or someone defusing bombs, and the like).
It's a bizarre self-torture culture we have in Medicine. It's the exact opposite of some other lines of work where people want to make their work day easier on themselves. But we brag about how much we can make our jobs suck more than they have to. It's crazy, the administrators know it's part of our culture, and they feed on it.
Absolutely horrible that physicians get treated like that. What's the point of going though 8+ years of higher education just to be treated the same way I was at my pre-medschool job.
In residency, we had an attending that no matter how busy the ED was, would leave the ED every shift for thirty minutes to eat in the cafeteria (with a phone and reachable of course, in case of a true emergency, not a fabricated "metrics emergency"). We all mocked him as if he was some sort of freak of nature, that he actually took 30 minutes not to run around like a chicken with his head cut off, over the piles of completely non-emergent patients waiting. The guy was 60+ yrs old for God's sake, and had earned the right to a lunch break if anyone else ever had. I realized later, that the trick was being played on everyone else. He was the sane one.
even these metrics get fudged now. many places have a provider in triage who says hi to the pt before their 3 hr wait in the waiting room. but hey, they've been seen within 5 min of arrival...even if there are no beds in back for folks with active chest pain or GI bleeds...and yes, most admin folks are worthless. I believe in the parking lot rule: record all license plate #s in the staff lot at 1 am m-f and at noon on saturdays and sundays for a month. anyone whose name doesn't make the list after a month is extraneous to the operation of the hospital and should be at the top of the layoff list when the hospital cries poverty q 2 yrs while the CEO takes home millions of dollars/yr.
"Chart rack anxiety" Does that qualify one for full disability payments?
When I was a medic in philly in the early 90s I spent way too much money on shift at Wawa.
