My fellow physicians. We gotta keep nurses’ names out of our mouths.
My thoughts: a lot of us in medicine martyr ourselves. We’re trained to. We are told by executives, admin, patients, and our own role models that our sole role is to serve, that we are immensely privileged to be in our profession (which we are), that we get paid well enough that we shouldn’t complain about the service we signed up for. I often get told that I am “brave” for pushing against this concept, which I think is dehumanizing and makes us ripe for exploitation by people looking for inexhaustible worker bees.
I would think & hope our frustration would translate to more collective action. But instead…I see a lot of the ire about these issues- issues that originate within OUR profession– being put on NURSING. We’re upset that nurses have administrative positions. We’re upset that nurses have expanded their practice over the years. We’re upset, in a lot of ways, that nursing as a profession has negotiated a perceived better work/life balance than we have. And we’ve rallied behind entire organizations whose whole purpose is to take down nursing institutions, even though half the time we’re the ones hurting ourselves. Y’all! We could get our bag too if more of us could get it together!
I think there’s a lot of nuance to this take, including elements that I encounter in training that I hope my followers who are advanced practitioners / nurses consider, & I’ll try to get to it in my story. But I also want to point out that when I said I was going to post this comic, I got TONS of gleeful DMs assuming it was going to be slamming on nurses for interpersonal slights. And I promise you, if that’s the discourse you want to be having, there’s plenty of it on Twitter. And disclaimer since the internet likes to think in black & white: this isn’t meant to diminish any negative interpersonal experiences that any of you, esp women, may have had. (I’ve had those too! I’ve drawn about them!)