Three statements that the nurse made in this virtual scenario in which the nurse is giving report on a patient that made me uncomfortable were: “Who knows where he is from?” “He’s one of those, if you know what I mean.” and  “Oh you know the type of people that hang out at the park just east of here. The one the police are always at.”

Each statement is important because the nurse giving report does not see that these statements can be seen as racist and hurtful. She needs to be told that each of these statements indicate that she looks down on this patient and judges him for where he is from and where he hangs out. This judgment about the patient can affect how we care for the patient and may have negatively impacted the care she provided for this patient if she had a negative opinion about him before she even met him.

In this scenario I was really uncomfortable with how she was rolling her eyes and trying to rush through the report. Report is a time where you can tell the patient’s story to the next nurse on shift and help create a picture about who these patients are above and beyond what is factually said in their chart already. If I was receiving this report it would upset me and I would have to say something to the nurse because her comments are so negative and not respectful of the patient.

One time that I experienced an uncomfortable situation was when I was at a clinical and the nurse I was with was receiving report on a patient that had a history of IV drug use. During report I could tell that the nurse was judging the patient for their tolerance to pain medications. She was judging the patient for how she would ask for pain medications directly at the time that they were due and that the patient would be extra cranky when she wanted pain medications. All I could think about was how much pain this patient must be in because she had endocarditis and since she has a history of iv drug use, medications that help with pain are less effective. I feel like patients that have this history deserve so much sympathy from nurses because they are dealing with high levels of pain and the medications are not as effective as they would be for a patient that does not have a tolerance in their body from past opiate use. After the night nurse gave us the report I discussed with the nurse I was following about the night nurse’s tone of judgment while talking about the patient and the nurse told me she was going to speak with her manager about this because it made her uncomfortable as well and she didn’t know that travel nurse well enough to feel comfortable addressing the comments with the nurse herself in that moment.