Any aspie nurses out there?

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i believe aspies can be trained to become nurses, however, nursing school and learning on the job when u first get hired, really screws everyone up. clinicals are often a joke with the instructor just trying to pass the time with letting students do as little as possible to minimize the chances of them messing up and getting her in trouble. there is not enough practice to learn all those skills - not enough lab hours and not enough patient care experience. doctors get better training when they practice as residents. i believe that nursing students should be allowed to go from patient to patient, assessing lung sounds and so on on 10-50 patients per day, then looking at the documentation to see if their assessment is right. yes, it would be a hassle for the patients, but ultimately it would be better for the system. also, in school, nursing students should practice looking through real patient records and reading through real cases and making decisions as if they were nurses. not little fairy tale vignettes in the text book. for example, in pharmacology, students should have to look through 100s of medication lists of patients and to list side effects to monitor for, lab values required, and to for example infer what the patient is treated for based on these meds. for example, do they teach you in nursing school that u need an iv before removing a central line just in case u can't get an iv in? no. also when nursing students graduate, they should be required to work as one on one nurses under 1/4 the normal nurse's load. to 1) orient to the unit 2) practice skills and have ample to time to ask for help. nurse's should be taught how to utilize support groups and how to cope with anxiety and depression and how to exercise and eat healthy and prevent lower back pain.
many nurses and doctors divert drugs, many drink alcohol, and many succumb to obesity, depression, family problems and so on. also working random 12 hr shifts is bad for patient care as a sleep deprived doctor or nurse has a decreased attention span. there should be a systematic way of teaching residents new skills, so that they don't have to practice on unsuspecting patients. how about - if you let a student practice on you, you get a discount on your medical bill. dr. gawade's books on this are right on.

we also need career nursing assistant and to stop the turn over of paraprofessionals on the unit - it's all because of bad management. it often makes no sense who gets fired and who gets to keep their job. it's often more about if the nurses like the assistant, not if the assistant does good work. people also should be blunt about the job, and just focus on patient care and leave office politics aside. basically the whole system works by everyone shoving their responsibilities on the other: health insurance shoves the costs of care on the doctors by not reimbursing or giving too much paperwork, the doctors shoves work on the nurse by writing illegible or incomplete orders, the manager understaffs and undertrains the assistants so the nurse has to answer phones, stamp charts, clean patients, and please them by bringing them water and adjusting pillows - things assistants should be doing. the assistants don't answer call lights and hide in patients rooms shoving the work on each other, and shove work on the nurse. the nurse then is forced to do things to please the patient to avoid complaints and saves time on doing what matters such as running through assessment too quickly, or not wearing gloves in a room on precautions or not changing gloves after helping clean a patients bowel movement, then touching the stethoscope and the light switch and other things with the same gloves or throwing dirty linen on the floor. nurses and doctors often cannot call out sick if they have flu symptoms so they end up infecting patients and each other. it should be acceptable to nurses and doctors to work all day in a mask. and all this job hopping is counterproductive. tavel and float nurses have to waste time orienting to the unit. why not have nurses and doctors who have worked in one hospital in the same unit for ten years and are super experts in it?

this would create a much better health care system. same thing with doctors. we should not accept anyone into medical school - if you want to be a doctor, there should be programs that teach you right from high school - where you start training in the medical sciences right away so that you don't have to cram too much in three years of medical school and so that you have experience under your belt.

Well, since my last post I got a job working on a telemetry floor at night. I worked there for about a year and then they let me go. Part of it was because I'm an aspie and the other is directly related to nurse bullies. I was actually doing rather well at it. Then they started floating me to other floors and to monitor rooms (where the ekg monitors are). Only then was it obvious that something was up given that I was floating almost every day and others weren't floating at all.

So anyhow, I'm not currently working as a nurse and have no immediate plans to go back.

Well I have since found a job in software engineering which is where I belong. The job just came out of the blue. I'm probably going to keep my nursing license active, but I really hope that I wont ever have to use it.

I tried. I made it through a semester of LPN and then dropped in Feb. when it became crystal clear my instructors had every intention of failing me in clinical. I aced the classroom part but couldn't pick up the clinical fast enough. Because I didn't have CNA experience, which they now require...I just went and took the test to get in the LPN program. Essentially it was CNA skills that pushed me out of nursing school. If I used the word I want to use for my instructors, I would get banned from this forum. Because of the time and money I invested just getting into that program, a year of my life. Definitely singled out. I had intended to go back and finish, this month I should have started again. But the further away I got from it the more traumatic it became to me, thinking about going back. An absolute nightmare, nursing school. My hat is off to anyone, especially any aspie, who can get through it. Bless your heart, to the nth power. The ONLY positive thing that I took away from it was my experience with my patients, who were the absolute salt of the earth, at the facilities we worked at. I never had a bad or difficult patient (which is funny since toward the end they were intentionally giving me the worst ones they could come up with). I loved them dearly...I had no idea what to expect, because I had no medical experience, I thought certainly they would be awful...that they would spit and curse and throw things at me, because they were sick and/or in pain. But they were all amazing people, that I had great experiences with. My instructors were intentionally giving me the junkies and crackheads, that none of the other nurses wanted, at the end. And we would get along famously and have a great day together. I loved my patients and it makes me sad that I won't get to experience that again. But nothing on this earth could make nursing school appealing to me again. And the staff of most hospitals...straight out of NT hell. Sad, but true.

Well, here is the bad news about becoming a nurse these days...There aren't any jobs. There are a few, but most if not all want a minimum of a year experience. So if you got your license today, you most likely would have trouble finding work. A few years ago there were so many nursing jobs that all you needed was a license and a pulse and you would get a job.

When I went through school it was really rough - especially in clinical. I actually got expelled. I went to the administrator and asked her to withdraw me as "withdraw-passing" because I was passing all the other classes. The default option was "withdraw-failing" and you couldn't come back if that was the case. When I explained what had happened to the administrator, she ordered my reinstatement. There is more to it than that, but that's the sum of it.

So basically, there are bullies all through nursing school and in the hospitals. Caring for the patients is the easy part.

I'm not a nurse but.. I am a 4th year medical student. I have experienced intense push backs from some doctors because I don't have a "dr personality" but I have also had very unique experiences which were rooted in my autistic behaviors

Nobody ever said that to me, but my lack of a "nurse personality" probably didn't help me deal with patients. My most favorite patient was blind ones. Of course I hate the fact that they were blind in the first place, but their vision problems prevented them from picking up phony body language that I never sent. Of all my patients, they were the easiest to get along with.

I'm impressed that there are people with AS who are nurses. I' a med student and I find the clinical work very difficult; I could never be a nurse.

The nursing heirarchy seems quite similar to medicine (i.e. it's not how good you are, but how much you kowtow to whoever's ranked above you). I lived with a nurse last year (very empathetic and I'm quite sure NT) who ran into trouble all the time because although she was very good and knew her stuff, and the patients loved her she aways managed to rub her tutors up the wrong way

What about a veternaty technican? It's called a veternary nurse in some places and is esentaly that. Anyone here one of those?

i work around nurses and cnas all day and can tell you that it is the worst possible environment for an aspie/spectrum person to be in. some here may already know that i work as a housekeeper. i'm almost at the suicidal point.

i could go on and on about the passive-aggression, gossip, malice, phoniness, laziness, apathy, stupidity, gluttony, one-dimensionality, condescension, incompetence, narrow-mindedness and bigotry i am subject to EVERY DAY. they are the complete polar opposite of most of the doctors, who are pretty cool. it has made me become completely disillusioned with the healthcare system, and want to avoid ever having to be hospitalized, for anything.

and yes, they ARE laughing at you.