Nurses eating their young is a relationship gone awry.
There is a phenomenon in nursing where the people who work the hardest and are sometimes compassionate to a fault, will undermine their younger peers by failing to give all needed information about patients, hiding information about standard procedures, or just being rude to them. But never let it be said that an older nurse cannot become the prey to this phenomenon also. Why does this happen and who is likely to be a victim?
Personally I have seen new perky graduates, filled with zeal and desire to work hard, met with the cold shoulders of older nurse who feel that the younger nurses have not paid their dues. Besides what do they know? ( I have been doing this for X number of years? What could this “youngun” possible show to tell me?)
I came from a teaching school and it was drilled in us to take every chance to share what we knew with other members of our nursing team to help provide better care to the patients. Little do I know just how much it would help someone or how they will view me down the road? Recently I was having lunch with a bunch of nurses, when one of them related that she remembered when we first started to work together, some 32 years ago. I had taught her how answer the phone correctly. She then went on to tell the group about other lessons she received from me.
There are now hospitals which are pairing younger nurses with more experienced nursing mentors. I hope this is to assist in the learning process of the new hire. But also to get the older nurse to see the younger nurse as a promising member of the team and not competition for their job. While working at small privately owned hospital, I was worked fulltime without benefits for months. Others were given full time jobs, with benefits ahead of me. Why? I was hired for nights and only wanted to work nights since I had been working that shift for thirty years. This was a subtle way of trying to get me to quit since they could not fire me as my work far superior to anyone who was employed there. This shows how some nurse will sabotage a peer. Why does this happen? What can be done to stop this? I don’t think there is an answer or cure yet. But if we are to keep new nurses, there has to be a change.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Nursing.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.