Paywall removed: https://archive.is/rRQ5W
Surgical tech here. We have a couple boomer nurses (nurses… y’know… people who’ve taken microbiology and made it through nursing school… FUCK!) who think coming in to work when they’re sick is some kind of display of godlike work ethic.
One of those fuckers came in with a stomach flu or some shit last fall, and proceeded to infect pretty much the entire department and who knows how many patients.
We had so many call-ins through the following week or so, that we literally had to cancel a TON of surgeries because we just didn’t have the staff to do them.
Good job, Nurse Karen. You really are a rockstar for sucking it up and coming in even when you didn’t feel good… all it cost was stabbing your entire team in the stomach, costing the hospital probably a few hundred thousand in lost revenue (then again, that shit should be free anyway, so, honestly fuck the hospital), and maybe killed a patient or two after coming to us when their body is already fucked to the point of needing to cut it open to fix something - yeah they don’t have the same immune system we do.
Shit pisses me off. If you’re sick, stay the fuck at home!
Covid taught me that a nurse’s education is wholly inadequate. I also think they may be becoming irrelevant with so many specialized techs.
I’m actually in nursing school right now - trying to switch over to the dark side!
From what I’ve seen so far, at least judging entirely by the program I’m in / the half of it I’ve progressed through, the education side is fine.
When I first became a tech, one of my culture-shocks way early on going into the medical field was that there are people at all levels who are just fucking stupid. Even doctors, who you’d assume are just all-around really intelligent people, are susceptible to the same bullshit that tricked grandpa into posting anti-vaxx rants on facebook.
The kicker is that none of us are really ‘all around’ good or bad at anything. Aforementioned doctor might know the absolute shit out orthopedics because that’s what he studied; but the instant your orthopedic doc sticks his toe outside of that very specific bubble, crank the skepticism up to 11, even when it’s other medical topics… Dr. Bones starts ranting about epidemiology and I’m going to assume he got his education on that topic from Fox and twitter memes.
Covid taught us that education takes a back-burner to values. If jeebus says vaccines are demon jizz, then vaccines are demon jizz. And the bar for the later is fucking low. Like, if a news anchor says a preecher said the vaccines are demon jizz… yup, they’re demon jizz! Whether or not it’s an actual part of you religion or w/e doesn’t matter (still waiting to see the part in scripture that says “covid vax bad; the other 500 vax you’ve gotten so far were all fine”), so long as some charismatic bobblehead confidently says it’s against your religion, suddenly it’s against your religion. Even if you’ve studied vaccines and know better “naw all those scientists lied. This new info is coming straight from GOD!”
…and the depressing part… dafuq do we do about it? We can’t just fire Nurse Karen for spreading pathogens and misinformation - Nurse Karen is thousands of people, and every one of them is plenty good at starting IVs and typing shit into a chart and such. Take them all out of the equation, and every single hospital there is just became short-staffed to the point of complete dysfunction. We need those dumb fucking monkeys to keep putting needles in veins, so we just collectively tolerate all the bullshit that comes with them.
I hate it.
There’s stupid people everywhere. The idea is that we can’t fool proof everything but we can promote change in attitude. There are no infallible people. I’ve met them all, engineers, doctors, politicians, millionaires, everyone has the potential for being utterly stupid at topics they aren’t even aware they are ignorant about.
One of the early jobs in my career was providing help desk tech support specifically to a group of nearby hospitals. Prior to that, I thought that - as you said - many or most medical professionals had an above average general intelligence by default. This job killed that theory.
The most prominent example I can recall is that of spending seventeen minutes on the phone trying to explain where to find a semicolon on the keyboard. Not what a semicolon is or how to use it or its function, just what it looked like and where it was on the keyboard. For seventeen minutes. At the end I think we gave up and found another approach. Obviously - again, as you said - their knowledge is specialized and I couldn’t do their job, but this and many other examples seemed pretty egregious.
That said, I’ve had a decent number of medical emergencies in my life and, while I’ve found a few doctors and nurses to be personally offensive, they’ve always seemed to do their job very competently and I’ve always, always appreciated them being there. Hopefully that demonstrates that the above example was an outlier.