Arrogance; I just can’t get enough

There are a lot of negative stereotypes out there about doctors, particularly about certain specialties. Say, for a completely random example, neurosurgeons. Possibly brilliant, but also with egos the size of… well, let’s just say with EGOS. Also maybe with just a touch of that feeling that while the rules might apply to everyone else, they certainly don’t need to follow them. And while I do tend to have sympathy for residents since their lives generally suck, certain behaviors are not going to improve relations between the nursing and medical staff. And while these same behaviors are inconvenient to the nursing staff, the patients are really the ones who suffer.
To illustrate – say that a patient comes back from surgery with new orders, but is missing a key order, one that involves spinal precautions that need to be observed. And say at this hospital spine orders are one of the few things that nurses cannot take verbal orders for. The implications of what can happen if proper spinal precautions are not followed are so great that doctors have to fill out a specific form. But even then, all it takes is a few minutes out of their busy lives. Even with the slow hospital elevators, 5-10 minutes max. Check a few boxes, circle a few items – it’s not neurosurgery people. So to continue with this story, say the dayshift nurse has already paged the MD a couple of times about these orders, and each time the doctor says. “Oh yes, we’ll be up to sign those soon,” yet when the nightshift arrives, the correct orders are not yet signed. Now say that night shift RN starts paging the doctor who says, “Yes we’ll be up soon on rounds, I understand you need to have these signed, we have a couple of bad cases in the ER right now, but soon.” Okay, understandable, though if they had filled the orders out properly to begin with it wouldn’t be an issue. Meanwhile the patient has to lie flat, and be log rolled, even though the nursing staff knows that she should be able to sit up in bed, and be able to reposition herself. The nurse goes in at one point and sees the patient sitting up in bed, and who says, “Oh the doctors were just in here and they told me that I don’t have to lie flat.” Yet when the nurse checks the chart the new spine orders are not there. She then has to re-page the resident who does not call back until she has paged him three times. He then makes a sarcastic comment, but says he’ll come and sign them. Which actually means that the orders will still not be signed 7 hours later, despite several more phone calls both by her and by the charge nurse. The orders were still not signed after the doctors did their morning rounds, even though they were stuck on the front of the chart with a note, and even though the doctors told the patient and her husband that they had been signed the previous night. The nurse goes through the entire chart – no new spine orders. And unfortunately it is often impossible to catch doctors on their morning rounds so she couldn’t hand the damn things to them in person. The crux of the story is that 12 hours after the nightshift RN started work, she has to pass the patient off to the next shift, still with incomplete orders. Classy. But this is just a hypothetical story; it’s not how I spent my last night at work or anything.