Silly Boy

Junior doctor thought that the nursing staff were being annoying because we kept calling him to get a patients pain controlled. Eventually he thought of a plan; he would get the nursing staff to carry out 15 minute neuro obs as the patient had a headache. We tried to get him to change this, arguing it was not in the patients best interest as he would not get any sleep and he was not ill enough for this level of observation. we even pointed out that if the patient really needed 15 minute obs they should be transferred to a neuro ward or at least be CT scanned. No, the bold boy was going to get the nurses running around because we had annoyed him. Being the experienced nurse I am I took him aside and spoke to him male to male and told him that if he insisted on this then we would do it and then we would page him and tell him the results. Every time we took a set of recordings he would be told. OK he said, go ahead, I will just turn off my pager. Then I dropped the bombshell onto his little power play. If you do not answer your page when we call we will keep paging you until you do answer. If after 15 minutes you have not answered we will then phone the registrar on call (his senior) and tell him the results and ask him what he wants done, and we will do this no matter what the time is. 2 minutes later, order cancelled and a junior doctor suddenly aware that a) he is at the bottom of the pile and b) nurses have ways of getting our own back and making uppity doctors behave.

Later on he turned out to be an OK guy, he was just having a bad day and had tried to take it out on us and we let him know we would not put up with it - everybody happy.