The medication is a blood thinner, the patient is a competent adult not in delirium, A&OX4. There are 2 ways to see this:

Manager’s and a group of doctor’s POV: you are a nurse and it’s your job and duty to do that. Plus, we know better than him what’s good for him. These people have built their identity around working in healthcare and to them this means I have to stay in the room and make sure the patient takes the medication.

My POV: nursing is not a calling but a job. What my manager and these doctors think is stupid:

  • the patient is a competent adult not in delirium, A&OX4. He’s old enough to know what happens if he doesn’t take the medication because we have told him a number of times already. I’m not his father and I’m not ready to treat a competent adult like a child.

  • I have other patients and I’m not going to waste my time watching a patient silently until he decides to take the medication. I’m charting that I left the medication next to him and told him he needs it and why and that I have other patients to take care of.

  • It is stupid to watch a person while doing nothing when I should be working with my other patients. It’s also invasive as f*ck.

I see it like this: my manager and this group of doctors are not ready to respect a person’s autonomy whereas I’m not ready to ignore this same autonomy, even if it means a negative outcome. Respecting a consenting adult’s autonomy means respecting his bad choices as well. I feel this group of doctors and my manager are not ready to respect any patient’s autonomy.

At this moment, this is a hill I’m willing to die on. AITA?

ETA: I wrote about a group of doctors, because there are other doctors that don’t give me hard time if a patient refuses his medication, they simply chart it and move on. I like working with doctors like this because I feel they don’t judge and respect the patient’s autonomy as well.

    • rufus
      1·
      11 months ago

      Could be a difference in international work culture? Or the nurses bent the truth a bit back when I was an intern there to make me do it because I was inexperienced. I work in a different field now. But I’m going to ask some of my relatives. I have family and friends who actually work as doctors and nurses.

      One thing I can tell you, being a patient at a hospital really sucks. I’ve been there for minor stuff like getting rid of my tonsils. And everyone in the hospital is overworked. The doctors barely have enough time to treat you properly and they’re absent most of the time. And the nurses’ time is even more valuable because they do all the hard work. They told me not to shower, eat, and ask for more pain meds if needed. Other than that I wasn’t really able to ask complicated questions. I felt every minute they spent with me was taken away from the dozens of other patients the nurses had to attend to. And most of the other patients had proper medical conditions. So I just took the random pills they gave me without questioning. I was an otherwise heathy patient about 30 back then. And it was quite an ordeal to find out why they keep me there and when I was going to get released. Also the anasthesia sucked and stuck with me for the entire day. And the other patient in the room sucked because he slept for like 4 hours and was in pain again and would watch stupid morning television with sound from like 4:30am. I mean I was treated properly, everything turned out great and especially the nurses treated me really well within their time limits. But except for the meals, which were surprisingly good for hospital food, everything was just a sucky situation for me. I don’t know where exactly I was trying to go with this… My situation worked out well because of established standard procedures. I don’t hold a grudge against nurses. They are very well trained professionals here. And they really get out of their way to treat you kindly. And sometimes that is all you have left in a sucky hospital day as a patient. Even I (with a minor sickness) completely relied on them because nobody had the time to explain things to me so I could make my own decisions. I guess all I want to say is, please do your job properly, whatever this is, we people rely on you.