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Pete Smith

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Content Article Comments posted by Pete Smith

  1. For us at Below Ten Thousand it was easy. To teach our students in Recovery, we used a deck of cards. 

    Hearts, clubs and diamonds represented hierarchies in the clinical spectrums of cardiovascular, respiratory and pain management, which form our core clinical competencies. 

    Then there is spades. 

    Spades represents the 25% of all knowledge, the stuff we NEED to know but we are NOT taught in our nursing curriculums, AKA the non-technical skills and knowledge that keeps you most safe most often throughout your career. 

    Spades? Because spades help you shovel your way out of the sh%t!

    The full description is on www.belowtenthousand.com

    Follow the menu to READD

    (Recovery Education and Discussion Deck)

    Pete!

  2. “Maybe I spent thirty years in the wrong job”

    I’ve thought that sometimes as I’ve reflected on my career as a nurse. 

    But that’s not it. 

    Nursing should be the greatest job in the world, and it was, but over thirty years it has reverted to a state of constant panic as resources have become overwhelmed and too much has become expected of too few. 

    Lanyards expect magic, but magic cannot obliterate the logic of simple mathematics  

    Nor will they listen to the non-magical solution I used to present to them:

    “Operating lists are manufactured workloads. Use your last free beds on elective surgery patients and the whole hospital will grind to a halt.”

    This was information I had dug out of an IHI White Paper on Patient Flow, but day after day at bed meetings simpleton managers made the same simpleton mistakes with monotonous regularity. 

    Who am I?

    i am just a nurse, and I know.

    It wasn’t  me who was in the wrong job.  

  3.  

    “I decided not to agree or disagree. I stated facts. Facts that could not be ignored.”

    I LOVE this!

    This is nursing at its finest.

    “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

    Sherlock Holmes.

    The truth is that the nurse has found a way to authentically represent the family’s concerns and the nurse’s professional judgement by rejecting the impossibility of doing nothing.

    Show me a hospital full of nurses like this, and I will show you a place where miracles occur for free every day!

     

     

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