The Blind Leading the Blind - Life in the Transition From New Grad to Seasoned Clinician
I remember when I was pregnant with my first child I worked in a community health centre as an addiction nurse. This was a temporary position that I took over from a nurse who had only been in the position a couple weeks and was asked to stop working there during my first orientation shift. My orientation (or lack thereof) left me bewildered about what the position actually entailed. With a little less than two years of experience as a Registered Nurse and my first position working semi-independently in a community setting I did not have complete understanding of what I was supposed to be doing. I spent most of my shifts waiting for phone calls from potential clients, taking stock of the nicotine replacement dispensed and putting together an orientation manual for my replacement without even really knowing if one was available. I was not sure what I was supposed to be doing so I tried to fill my time doing things to more or less look busy.
Almost three years later I would approach this situation completely differently. In retrospect I should have been communicating more with the rest of the team there and my direct supervisors to find out what I could have done to make the most of my time in that temporary position. However, I realize that my supervisors could have also done a better job of assessing where I was at in order to help me be useful in that position.
I see this same, "I don't know what I should be doing so I have to at least look busy," in some of my colleagues. Three years and a masters degree later I realize that there's really a lack of strong leadership in some health care settings. The people at the top do not know what the people on the front line are doing and the people at the front line feel like they are fumbling through the dark to accomplish something. In the end it seems that those at the front line are sometimes not utilized to the best of their abilities, those in administrative positions have no idea this is happening and the client does not get the best possible care that they can achieve. Further, in some ways I feel that the profession of nursing suffers because of this. Sometimes it seems like we work so hard to prove that we are useful by trying to doing tasks that are familiar, like giving out medication or changing a dressing that we forget that our role as Registered Nurses can and should be so much more. I find that sometimes my coworkers are so focused on completing tasks that we don't take step back and critically analyze how a health care setting can be better utilized to provide patient care.
I think that unfortunately in some settings because of high turnover and just the current demographic of nurses there is a saturation of new (or newer) graduates. I would classify myself in this group, but as I approach 5 years of experience, I am finding myself more and more employed in settings with RNs who have 2 years of experience of less. This is a tough situation because those training and mentoring new nurses are themselves new nurses who never had exposure to mentoring by an experienced nurse them.
It breaks my heart when I hear newer nurses say things like, "they keep hiring idiots here," dismissing new graduates before they even have a chance to learn. Undergraduate nursing is not an easy degree to complete. How do we change this attitude? I don't know. Let's promise to work on it though.
Peace,
Michelle D.
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