The Nurses Quotes

“The trade-off seems like a no-brainer. Would you rather be bribed during your hospital stay with made-to-order omelets or would you rather be, for example, not dead?”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“California nurse Jared Axen was holding a dying hospice patient’s hand when he began to sing an old hymn. The woman, who didn’t speak English, hadn’t been responsive in days. But when Axen sang to her, she squeezed his hand, a response that soothed the woman’s family. Six years later, Axen, a classically trained musician, sings to some of his patients every day. “It gives them their humanity back,” he said. “Music is a common language that helps me connect with my patients.” Many patients also claim to feel better and to need fewer pain medications, Axen said. “It’s become a vital tool for my patients and their families.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“What is to give light must endure burning.’ I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“In 1967, psychiatrist Leonard Stein described the nurse’s role in an essay entitled “The Doctor–Nurse Game.” The object of the game, he said, was for a nurse to “make her recommendations appear to be initiated by the physician. . . . The nurse who does see herself as a consultant but refuses to follow the rules of the game in making her recommendations, has hell to pay. The outspoken nurse is labeled a ‘bitch’ by the surgeon. The psychiatrist describes her as unconsciously suffering from penis envy.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Medicine asked something extraordinary of nurses: to forge intimate connections with another person for hours, weeks, or months, to care thoroughly and holistically—and then to let that individual suddenly go, often never to be heard from again.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“As a Minnesota agency nurse said, “We are not just bed-making, drink-serving, poop-wiping, medication-passing assistants. We are much more.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“By treating patients like customers, as nurse Amy Bozeman pointed out in a Scrubs magazine article, hospitals succumb to the ingrained cultural notion that the customer is always right. “Now we are told as nurses that our patients are customers, and that we need to provide excellent service so they will maintain loyalty to our hospitals,” Bozeman wrote. “The patient is NOT always right. They just don’t have the knowledge and training.” Some hospitals have hired “customer service representatives,” but empowering these nonmedical employees to pander to patients’ whims can backfire. Comfort is not always the same thing as healthcare. As Bozeman suggested, when representatives give warm blankets to feverish patients or complimentary milk shakes to patients who are not supposed to eat, and nurses take them away, patients are not going to give high marks to the nurses.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“And when they are out in public, "we are secretly looking at people's arms to determine where we would start an IV," an Arizona nurse said. "Sometimes if I'm out with a group of nurses, we're like, 'Wow, look at those veins. I could hit those from across the room.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“I love my job, and I hope people find comfort in knowing there are still people out there who love what they do.” —a New York acute care nurse”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“how do doctors and nurses learn to behave and negotiate with each other?”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“We rely on nurses to be our healers, our heroes, to comfort us, to soothe our hurts and salve our psyches. But how often do we pause to wonder who takes care of the nurses?”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Nurses want patients to remember that from the moment patients enter a hospital to the moment they leave, nurses—not doctors—will be more intimately involved with their care.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Yes, we are taught to be patient advocates, but we are also taught to be a check on the doctor. The problem with that is we’re only taught to see docs as adversaries.” Nurses “never get a good understanding of the stresses and strains of what it’s like to be a physician.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“When nurse-doctor relations are poor, patients die unnecessarily.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“1980s, when a study of Intensive Care Units revealed that “the most significant factor associated with excessive mortality was the degree of nurse-physician communication”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Simpson calculated that if an inpatient nurse sees an average of even just four patients during a twelve-hour shift, in twenty years she will care for more than 11,000 patients and families. A clinic nurse who sees ten patients per shift will care for nearly 43,000 patients.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“But it is crucial to know that despite these issues, nurses love their jobs and will enthusiastically persuade potential recruits to join the field.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“wish I could start a revolution for ER nurses specifically; we are the rock stars of nursing, but are treated like the red-headed bastard stepchild.” —a North Carolina ER nurse”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Rather than addressing the nurses being spread too thin to provide care that is good enough, they assume the nurses aren’t coddling the patients adequately enough.” What annoys nurses is that the concept of “patient experience” has morphed patients into customers and nurses into “rank and file” automatons. Some hospital job postings advertise that they are looking for nurses with “good customer service skills” as their”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Molly had no desire to be a floor nurse. At every hospital where she had worked, there was a rivalry between the ER and the other nursing departments. “We think they’re lazy and they think we’re bitches,” Molly said. One of the most frequent complaints ER nurses had against floor nurses was that floor nurses tried to avoid getting new patients as shift change approached.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Molly had heard that some staff nurses treated agency nurses poorly, but she was surprised now that it was happening to her. “If the agency nurses weren’t there, the staff nurses would have a much higher patient ratio,” she explained. “We make their job easier, but they’re rude and unfair.” Another agency nurse had told Molly that one day she had arrived at an ER that had a total of seven patients. The charge nurse assigned her all seven. When the nurse asked why, the charge nurse said, “You’re agency. You’re getting paid more than us. You can handle it.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“I love the free entertainment that patients provide. People say and do the most ridiculous things, and I’ve got a front row seat to the absurdity.” —A Colorado travel nurse”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Nursing is more than a career; it is a calling. Nurses are remarkable. Yet contemporary literature largely neglects them.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“A solution to many of the issues in this book, and one that would go a long way toward fixing American healthcare, is relatively clear: Treasure nurses. Hire more. Nurses are perennially the number-one most trusted profession in America, according to an annual Gallup poll rating honesty and ethical standards. They are called to an exhausting commitment in which mortals must sustain an unwavering grace at the edge of life and death, almost divinely slowing heartbeats, hurrying them along, or pounding them back into existence. Nurses are exceptional. So why aren’t they treated accordingly?”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, male nurses ride the “glass escalator”; although they are in the minority, they receive higher wages and faster promotions than women in the same jobs.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“A St. Louis oncology nurse quoted Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl to States News Service in 2012: “ ‘What is to give light must endure burning.’ I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“nursing was a deeply interpersonal profession in which people had to depend on others—doctors, techs, fellow nurses—to do their job well.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“It is the nurse who holds the hand of a patient without a family, who talks to them while they take their last breaths, who aches for them while they die alone. It is the nurse who cleans the patient’s body, wipes away the blood and fluids, and closes his eyes. It is the nurse who says good-bye to the patient for the last time,” she said.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“The Academy ER had a sticker sheet of glittery Oscar statues that were reserved for patients who put on Oscar-worthy acts. The nurses would stick one on a patient’s chart so that everyone who treated the patient knew what to expect. Some staffers didn’t like Oscar because it gave the practitioners preconceived notions. But Molly thought it was funny and a stress reliever.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital

“Ignoring is a form of bullying because you’re blocking that person out. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like somebody. That’s fine. You don’t have to. But you need to be cordial to and communicate with that person at work.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital