What I’ve noticed…
Without getting too personal about my own life, I have had the opportunity to be involved with a family member staying in the hospital for a week. During this time I have found the general perception of pharmacists, especially hospital, to be against the nurses. When one of the nurses (a newly graduated one in fact) made a joke about “being on hold for the pharmacist in the in-patient pharmacy because she hadn’t received her IVs ordered” another nurse told her to go check a box that was received. She was on hold for the pharmacist and then just abruptly hung up. Yep, the pharmacists had sent it in fact, and I smiled on the inside. Not that pharmacists forget or don’t follow through sometimes… it’s just that the general perception is that we do all the time… nahhhh…
Another thing that I have watched is that nurses really can make a difference in patient care more than any other discipline. Not only are they touching the patient, assuring them, etc… They can go the extra mile. I had one nurse who was wonderful, another who was not and wanted to blame someone else… and I’m an easy patient. Just think about all the things you don’t even have to explain to me. I won’t ask many questions though I want to read the chart all the time… it’s hard to talk them into that.
Apparently I’m flagged though because they all know I work for the same company that owns the hospital. That has helped! I will return!
Filed under: Patient | Tagged: nursing nurses pharmacist hospital patient
Take time and care to return to health, Blonde Pharmacist!
(In my health system corporation, one isn’t allowed access to one’s own records, without some special permission…? basis–don’t know.)
As a pharmacist, I’ve never had problems with nurses either in or out of hospital, unless they didn’t know me…I can make a nurses’ life awfully uncomfortable, if she/he chooses to ** with me.
Some newly graduated ICU/CCU nurses would get a little uppity, but if they wanted their fentanyl drips statter than stat, they tried to get along. I never tried to let a comment about slow pharmacists get away, either, to make themselves look better than someone else. I figure (long time night pharmacist) that we were all in it for the long haul and it wasn’t good for patients to have antagonistic healthcare providers! (I didn’t badmouth the docs, either! I have found that pharmacists that badmouth others usually have something to hide, so am always a little suspicious about ‘excuses’. Just no good reason to badmouth anyone, anyway; sometimes just have to excuse our attitudes!
Saw something somewhere else (? on another website) by a lay person saying it was tantamount to evil and wrong of good docs not saying anything about incompetence of ‘bad’ docs. I don’t agree. If a doc is doing something wrong, then it should be reported to AMA or State Board, but I don’t think docs should be saying anything of consequence to patients about other docs. Opinion?
As I ponder the issue (of nurse pharmacist conflict), I think that most of the difficulties ensue because of one barrier: the telephone. I’ve been a hospital pharmacist for 15 years (the previous 13 were retail), and I do notice that personal contact is almost always cordial, while telephone contact causes confusion. Nurses don’t know exactly what is involved in pharmacy operations, nor do pharmacy people know exactly what goes on in nursing issues. Each of us has an idea, but I am not a nurse and don’t know exactly what issues a nurse has to endure as (s)he goes from one task to another. So, I’m not there, and they are not here, and there is usually a telephone between us.
When are you going to start using the domain that TAiestPh said you’d bought?
http://www.theblondepharmacist.com
Ole Apothecary, you are quite right about the absence of understanding due in part to nature of a phone call.
Many times I would take particular care to provide the nickel tour of the pharmacy on my night shifts (pointing out along the way quite clearly, the distance from the IV room to the computer terminal where orders entered the pharmacy, and the voluminous amount of drugs whose intimate knowledge was at my fingertips, taking care to answer the phone in their presence, as well as having my technician demonstrate something quite technical).
That ‘nickel’s worth’ was in itself one of the most valuable basis of an understanding of what went on in the pharmacy than anything I could ever have tried to verbally explain.
Any comments on outsourced hospital pharmacy management?
Hmmmm……
I totally agree about the phone comment between nurses and pharmacists. Email would be even worse, eh?