We’ve all heard of Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  But what about all of those people that we work with in health care?… you know… those people that are nowhere to be found in Mr. Covey’s book.  Just to make sure we’re all talking about the same people, here are the 7 Habits of Highly Annoying Nurses:

• Just calling “to let you know”.
• Writing “Doctor aware”.
• Saying, “It’s not my patient”.
• Referring to patients by their room numbers and not knowing their names.
• Smoke breaks.
• Waiting until the end of their shift to start their charting.
• Writing that they “read back” an order, when they did no such thing.

Feel free to add others for consideration.  Send us an email or just post a comment below.  For those annoying nurses that took offense to this post… two things: (1) If you do three or more of the above, you have no one to blame but yourself, and (2) the next post is one that you’ll love – The 7 Habits of Highly Annoying Doctors.  :0)

How many endocrine disorders to you see represented in this nurse clip art?

This is not a GiggleMed image. And it’s probably not meant to be funny.

You know that phenomenon of looking at someone and secretly wondering about their medical disorders just based on looking at them? We all do it and we rarely talk about it. It’s not really appropriate to bring it up outside of the health care setting.

Well, the same thing happened the other day when this clip art image was posted on a NPO sign outside of a patient’s hospital room. One endocrine disorder immediately jumped out, but on closer inspection, there are several. You can see the answer here, on this Endocrine Humor – Poster Child graphic.

This is a legitimate scale for stool quality

I take no issue with describing stool quality for medical purposes. I take no issue with graphic representation of those qualities. And, I take no issue with creating a scale for easier communication between doctors, nurses, and other health care providers.

I do, however, take issue with the fact that it reads like a breakfast menu…

Sources:

Lewis SJ, Heaton KW (1997), “Stool form scale as a useful guide to intestinal transit time”, Scand. J. Gastroenterol. 32(9): 920–4, PMID 9299672

“Constipation Management and Nurse Prescribing: The importance of developing a concordant approach” (PDF).

Wikipedia: Bristol Stool Scale

SCOE 10X – The Odor Eliminator – for Types 2 through 6 :)