Making Good on Private Duty: Practical Hints to Graduate NursesLounsbery, Harriet Camp
Science
Making Good on Private Duty: Practical Hints to Graduate Nurses
Lounsbery, Harriet Camp
Private duty nursing
I would like, in closing this chapter, to say a word as to reading
the daily papers. If your patient is a woman, she will want to
know just about what you, yourself, would be interested in, and
this is very easy; but if your patient is a man, it is harder to
know what he will want; politics, the money market, etc., which
most women skip over. If then your patient is a man, commence on
the first page and read slowly the headings of the news items,
when one strikes him, as desirable to hear, he will tell you to
read it; when you get through the news you may turn to the
editorial page and do the same there. Unless you know your patient
very well do not attempt to enlighten him as to the stock market
quotations, for it is, I suppose, well nigh impossible for an
ordinary woman to read them so that a man will understand her. He
will probably laugh over your well meant endeavor, and ask you to
"kindly let him look at the paper," when he will in a moment find
out what you have been trying to say.
II
THE NURSE AND THE DOCTOR
I suppose no nurse goes through a training school without being
duly impressed by all the doctors on the staff of lecturers that
they, the doctors, are the generals of the campaign. She and her
fellows are the aids, and that she will be kind enough to remember
this fact, and not make suggestions to him, the doctor, or give
him the fruits of her ripe experience of three years in a
hospital, and more or less time, as may be, since she has
graduated. But though this I think you all know, there are some
points of your connections with the doctor which may not be quite
so clear.
In the first place, then, remember that you are his _aid,_
you are to help him in every way you can, you are never to work
against him, never weaken the patient's confidence in him. If you
do not understand why he does thus and so, ask for an explanation,
if you know him pretty well, and if your questions are reasonable
ones, and intelligently put, he will be glad to answer you, and
explain all you wish explained; but if you do not know the reason
of a certain order, and, moreover, if he will not tell you, do not
assume that he does not know, or that he is cross; it may be some
very uncertain, delicate experiment is being tried, and all he
wants you to do is to tell him, with a free unbiased mind, what
you see. Always, however, be loyal to him with the patient. When
you are asked a thousand questions as to, "Why doesn't the doctor
do this, or why does he do that?" you can always say that he does
it, or does it not, for the patient's best good, of that you are
assured, and they must be also.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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