Hi everyone,
I'm a relatively new nurse having only worked for 16 months. I work in med/surg.
One of my biggest surprises has been that a significant minority of my patients are pathological wimps. Even prior to seeing them they can often easily be spotted by examining their medical records. For example, I frequently notice that wimps have an obscene (and often downright odd) amount of special meal requests.
Current nursing philosophy encourages nurses to be endlessly supportive of wimps. I.E. to follow the often demonstrably wrong idea that "the patient is always right." The patient who insists on several adjustments to the normal meals will normally be appeased. These patients are typically the ones who abuse narcotics, who sit on their call lights all day, etc. They are far more likely than non-wimpy patients to be on long-term public assistance, to come in from living on the streets, to have contracted HIV via self-chosen unprotected sex and to demonstrate other characteristics of lack of responsibility.
My impression is the patient is probably right if they demonstrate responsibility in their non-patient lives. Being compassionate towards such patients is the responsible approach for a nurse. On the other hand I question whether we're really being compassionate or simply being doormats for the irresponsible portion of our patient population.
Incidentally speaking from the perspective of a nurse in the USA I question whether the UK model of universal health care would work well here. My impression is the USA has a higher percentage of irresponsible people than most (all?) other civilized nations. These people could quickly drain even the most well funded national health care system. That is unless we change the misguided philosophy that the patient is always right.
Nerissa
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