3min chapter

Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter cover image

Fixable: Kelli - "How do I deal with a communication breakdown?"

Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter

CHAPTER

The Relationship Between a Physician Assistant and a Nurse

"I think that it's a partially, you know, a personality thing. I think also that a lot of the doctors ... hide in an office," she says. "It's just important to have environments where we're able to get to know each other outside of our jobs as healthcare workers"

00:00
Speaker 1
You know,
Speaker 3
I work with my older brother. My older brother and I work on the same unit. We went to nursing school a few years apart and there's one physician assistant who I work with who he got wind of that my brother and I work together. And whenever I work a weekend shift with this provider, he's always like, are you going to Sunday dinner at your mom's with your brother? He wants to get to know who I am as a person, not just sees me as one of the nurses. He knows me. And whenever I take anything to him and I say, hey, I've got this problem with this patient, their heart rhythm is showing this. We need to get on top of this. We need to give them this medication to get a heavace before things deteriorate. He immediately is like, yep, I hear what you're saying. Let me go check on the patient. Make sure they're okay. And then we're going to do X, Y and Z to make sure that they're okay. And I think that that has so much strengthened our ability to work together for these patients is that we know each other as people and not just another member of the group.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Why did this particular relationship have the oxygen for you guys to get to know each other? Or the space or what happened differently here? Um, I think
Speaker 3
that it's a partially, you know, a personality thing. I think also that a lot of the doctors, a lot of the teams, when it comes to like sitting down and doing their charting and their computer work, they go back and hide in an office. And he's one tool kind of hang out at the nurses station and do a lot of his stuff at the nurses station. And there's a lot of chit chat at the nurses station. That's where we all kind of talk about our days and see how the others are doing and talk about our lives outside of the hospital. And that's where you can learn the, oh, these two random nurses who work together and are always hanging out are actually siblings. Like, I think it's just important to have
Speaker 1
environments where we're able to get to know each other
Speaker 3
outside of our jobs as healthcare workers.
Speaker 1
So I want to start there in the fixable portion of this conversation. I want to start in that sandbox, Francis, if that works for you. So, um, one place my head is going is, is there a possibility in this system to not rely wholly on the personality and social competence of the physicians for that moment to happen? One thing we learned from academia, if I can channel, like your freshman year and the awkward ice cream social moment, like, would it be even structurally possible to introduce some kind of formality for new doctors, like new providers coming on, new nurses to say, okay, here's what you do in your first week to get to know your colleagues in this system. You know, we're going to make the implicit explicit. Instead of going back to your room, we're going to tell you what to do. We want you to do this work out here in the open air where this kind of informal and organic get to know you can happen. So let me just get your reaction to that. Is that it? Okay. And because I'm going to push on it, I'm going to push a lot harder if there's any traction there.

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