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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
perfectly oiled machine in comparison.
I'm at a big-city hospital, which
means we're visited by a fair number of "members of the local gun
club." I haven't seen this many
seriously ill patients in a single
hospital in all my years of nursing. And if the EMR system goes
down, the night shift has limited
access to support staff, who all seem
to punch out at the end of the afternoon.
(No one's told the IT infrastructure it's allowed
to malfunction only during daylight hours.)
Night and day
But there's a bright side, too, in the people who work nights. They're
really a different breed. They do their job with what's available to
them. They seem to get along and genuinely try to help each other
through their shifts. I haven't heard any bickering, backstabbing or
arguing whose turn it is to handle the next case. Even the surgeons
seem different: They share a laid-back realization that the staff on
hand is the staff that's available, and that everyone's doing everything
they can to get the job done.
I have to commend the charge nurses, staff nurses, scrub techs and
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