Nurses

A 'joke' I heard on the ward:

House Officer 1: How many nurses does it take to change a light bulb?

House Officer 2: Errrr.... One?

HO1: Nah, try again.

HO2: Ten?

HO1: Nah. Give up?

HO2: Yeah yeah, give up.

HO1: 3.

HO2: Huh?

HO1: Yep. One nurse to take the 1st break. One nurse to take the 2nd break. And one more nurse to bleep the House Officer on-call to change the bulb.


My apologies if you don't understand the joke. But then again, you've probably never experienced the frustration of trying to find a nurse when they're taking their breaks, which seem to last nearly forever; or tearing your hair out when a patient was supposed to get his blood transfusion the night before but didn't get it because the nurse-in-charge 'forgot'; or getting bleeped by a nurse and having to phone him/her back, only to have the phone answered by a different nurse who doesn't know what's going on, and when you finally decide to walk to the ward the call came from in the first place, you find out that the nurse who bleeped you needed something really trivial done, like a discharge script that could have waited till the next morning, or even better, bleeped the wrong house officer about a patient not under his/her care that the house officer knows nothing about. And then, when something goes wrong, it's the doctor's fault, not the nurse's, because doctors don't get any breaks until the ward rounds and jobs are done.

And the first person to comment about how badly nurses get it and how much less they're paid will be struck by a light bulb that an overworked house officer didn't screw in tightly enough.

Sigh. But we do need nurses to do all the things doctors don't, or won't, do.