One More Wanging

I need sleep; the last two days, I have been thoroughly wang-eyed. So much so I was in fear of fonging the car on the way home...

Anyway; of scut, and scutmonkeys. Faith is having some difficulty with her nurse mentors. Now, I don't pretend to understand nursing training. Mostly, I don't understand nurses. I just do what they tell me.

All the student nurses we see are attached to a trained nurse (or maybe more than one? one per shift, one at a time? You See! I don't know!) and so I guess they do what the trained nurse does, and learn how to become the shining examples of patience and goodliness that are nurses. Or at least the ones that have to put up with me, anyway. How nurses decide what their trainees can do, or are allowed to do, I have no idea.

With medical students, I ask 'em what they wanna do, then make 'em do what I think they should be doing. Hopefully there is interaction between the two. Where possible, I like to try and stretch the students, get them out of their comfort zone, doing something they aren't quite comfortable with; but something they'll need to do sooner or later. A 'get it over with' strategy.

Faith, on the other hand, seems to spend most of her time being told what she can't do. It seems to me that there are really very few things that a person should be forbidden to do. If your entrance programme works ok, that is you aren't admitting muppets to your training programme, then why not let 'em at it?

Of course, this has to be a 'within reason' strategy. But if a third year student wants to cannulate someone, why not? Hell, if they're too afraid to do it on patients, I let 'em do it to me. I firmly believe in 'see one, do one, teach one'. And I don't see why it should be different for nurses. These are intelligent people we're dealing with, surely. Can't they be treated as such? Or am I just blowing gas about something I know very little about?

Lastly, for the sake of Devil's Advocacy, I think, in fairness, that being a student is mostly about being the scutmonkey, in all it's various guises - bedmonkey, admisions monkey, arsemonkey, etc. Sometimes, you just have to chimp up, and get what you can from the grooming.

(Yes, I know chimps aren't monkeys. It's dramatic licence. Don't make me fong your wanging eyes...)