ideal ideas

When I was staff, we had this "Idea Board."

This stupid board was not, by the way, the nurses' idea.

It was our manager's stupid idea.

She liked this idea, because every so often, she'd drag us into the nursing bubble with our little index card suggestions to questions like, "How do we improve staffing on our floor?" and, one by one, she'd summarily dismiss our common sense approaches to chronic problems. (My favorite answer to that particular question by the way, was "Hire more staff.")

Her reponse to these logical employee-offered answers was inevitably, "No, we can't do that [i.e., hire more staff to fix staffing problems, make people do their jobs if they weren't doing them, etc.]."

So, the "idea board" was her way of pretending to give us some control and input into decisions that we knew from the get-go we had nothing to do with what we as staff nurses needed or wanted.

It was pretty farcical, and I think her flagrant and very public disregard for our actual "ideas" to "our problems" just contributed to our burn-out, nursing angst, and disgust with the general establishment. Also, quite frankly, I think it would have been better had she not asked us to "own our problems," which I thought of as generally her problems.

When she told us we needed to "own the problem of staffing" and that it wasn't "her responsibility" to staff the floor, I thought, 'Well, then, here's an idea, bitch: can we fire you, and get someone else who thinks it's a manager's responsibility to staff her own floor?'

That was my idea, and it really hasn't changed. (I didn't have too many ideas that made it past the idea-board-in-my-head if you hadn't already guessed).

I also thought it was a bit suspect when we'd put "ideas" up on the "idea board" and mysteriously, they'd be spirited away, as if by the manager fairies, and we'd never see or hear about them again.

I felt the whole stupid idea board was sort of like the parenting model where the parent supposedly gives the child input into their own punishments and rewards, and then says, "No, sorry, we're not going to do that, because you're the kid, and I'm the parent, that's why, so shut yer trap."

In other words: it was a completely inconsistent and completely untrustworthy method of leading people.

Any way.

Yesterday, when I came into work, I felt like that blind guy Jesus cured, or something.

Because lo, there was our manager taking patient admissions.

Let's see.

If I could explain this phenomena of nurse managers "working the floor" to non-nursing folks, it would be like finding out things like God, the concept of hen's teeth, or Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster or lenancy in the legal system actually exists for people other than Paris Hilton (although we now know that, thanks to her jail-time, God does exist for Paris.)

Or maybe, it would be as if George W. actually went to Iraq and fought his own stupid war. Or at least, sent his own daughters and friends' kids to fight the war.

Any way, I was writing a friend of mine who used to work on Old Crappy Staff Floor, and said, "'Have nurse managers take patients when it's really busy': now there's a suggestion I'd like mail in to that fucking stupid Idea Board."

Seems to me like the only "idea" our manager ever had on Old Crappy Staff Floor when we were busy is to ominously glide onto the floor like some grim-faced Jacob Marley, decide it was necessary to float half of the incoming nurses at change-of-shift, and agree with the staffing office that charge nurses and staff nurses taking two admissions a piece at evening change of shift on a busy cardiac floor was completely safe staffing, and admonish us for "not being better team-players" if we protested her stupid-ass "idea."

Then, the manager would be gone. I never did see her fly out the window like Jacob Marley in the t.v. version of A Christmas Carol, but I imagine there were quite a few nurses that would have liked to have shoved her out the window.

Or least, shove her stupid fucking Idea Board out the window.