The "In Your Face Nurse series," by Deneece O'Haughn...
is a look at healthcare politics through the eyes of several "real" highly experienced RNs using one imaginary persona . It's also an "in your face" attitude explanation of the "whats and whys" of various nursing specialties and departments found in common healthcare facilities.
Healthcare is becoming very expensive and confusing.
Because of this, healthcare personnel, such as nurses, are being used and abused as is the uninformed patient. This increases costs in the long run and causes the Medicare and Obamacare system to drag to what seems like a complete halt at times.
The "In Your Face Nurse" Part 1
takes a look at the Recovery Room or Post Anesthesia Care Unit in a hospital.
The attitude is often shocking and appalling but when you read it, whether you support or disdain the perspective, you should walk away with a good sense of what the nurse is trying to convey to you. You may or may not like the writer's demeanor but the point is driven home.
Written with a sometimes "humorous" slant (unless you're the patient), the IYF Nurse tells it like it supposedly is, from his or her perspective.
If every patient would take heed to what is revealed, their experience in the healthcare facility (the recovery room in this case) should be a better one, overall.
As the lengthy forward states, (ad lib) nurses don't hate people but so much misuse and abuse by patients and other healthcare personnel brings about a frustrated and often overwhelmed nurse who is also at the mercy of closed-minded administrators, doctors and co-workers. These discrepancies bring about an "attitude" of sorts to most bedside nurses, in due time.
This often brings out the worst in a nurse. In this particular book, the nurse with an attitude informs her perspective patients about what may happen to them if they push the nurse too far or past the "boiling point." Of course, the actual conversation occurs in the nurse's mind and is conveyed here through the written word.
This presents an interesting perspective that brings with it a certain realism and bitter truth.
While it's true that some nurses don't share this inner sense of resentment and frustration, it may be a surprise to find that many of them actually do feel much as described in this book. Professionalism can only carry one so far when they are at the mercy of a hostile environment on a daily basis.
Then why don't they just "get out of nursing?"
There are a variety of reasons just as there are for those who choose to look beyond their environments in many other professions. Another opinion that O'Haughn brings up is that the answer to nursing frustration is not criticism and beratement of those professional nurses who have reached their "boiling point" but rather a truly researched attempt at understanding how they got to that point, followed by a genuine industry-wide attempt to alleviate most of the reasons.
By doing so, healthcare, as a whole, and most patients, may benefit greatly.
One of the points of Deneece O'Haughn's book is that maybe it's time to take a close look at the whole of nursing, and find out exactly why this type of attitude exists in the first place. Then maybe the entire healthcare establishment will finally "get it."
