When you go to a hospital, you likely will be treated by more than one nurse before you ever meet a doctor. Because many people don’t understand all the responsibilities and mindsets of health care workers, BestLife asked veteran nurses what they wish their patients knew.
Here are some of the responses:
The ER is not first come, first served
Unless you’re being wheeled in on a gurney or walk in having a heart attack, you’ll likely have to wait much longer in the emergency room than you expect.
“In any urgent care or emergency room setting, patients are seen based on how sick they are, not in order of what time they arrived,” ER nurse Lauren Mochizuki, RN, BSN, told BestLife. “In other words, the patient that is suffering from a heart attack or neurological deficits will be seen before a patient with a broken arm or a cough.”
Wrong meds can get called in
As highly trained as nurses are, they aren’t perfect. Mistakes are possible, and sometimes the wrong medication might get called in to the pharmacy.
Amelia Roberts, RN, BSN, encourages patients to always “double-check the bottles while at the pharmacy and question anything that is unfamiliar.”
Bathroom breaks are sometimes a luxury
According to BestLife, many of the nurses it spoke to said going to the bathroom is a luxury, “one that’s extremely hard to fit into a typical shift.”
“I hold off going to the bathroom as much as humanly possible,” retired nurse Bonnie Emery, RN, BSN, said.
Family time is often sacrificed
School plays, weddings and other events often have to be placed on a back burner when you’re a nurse.
Because nursing shifts can last as long as 12-14 hours, family time must either be scheduled “way in advance,” said Shantay Carter, RN, BSN, founder of Women of Integrity Inc., or it doesn’t happen.
Nurses genuinely care about their patients
Marlon Saria, PhD, RN, told BestLife a nurse’s demeanor often masks their feelings to protect both the patient and the caregiver.
In reality, he said, nurses “get worried when stats start to slide downhill and shed tears when they learn a patient’s cancer has returned.”
“I wish that my patients knew how much I (and my colleagues) care for them,” Saria said.
