Nursing’s inferiority complex: why you’re never ‘just’ a nurse
Managing high-stakes, safety-critical situations is a daily reality in nursing, yet some of us can’t resist the urge to downplay our role
I’m just a nurse, I said, when asked what I did to earn a crust. Then I gave myself a good earwigging. I get annoyed when nurses come up with that one, and there I was saying it myself.
Sometimes I think we have a profession-wide sense of inferiority, possibly because we work alongside the medics who have a perceived glamour all of their own. Nurses are just their sidekicks, right? Wrong – ‘just’ a nurse does not reflect reality.
Nursing interventions have critical importance and require skill, knowledge and judgement
I’m sure we all read recently about trainee nurse practitioner Alice Chappell who dealt so calmly and efficiently with a severely traumatised casualty who turned up at her minor injuries unit. She would say she was just doing her job, which is true, but just doing your job as a nurse can take you into some challenging places.
It takes a cool head to be a member of our profession, because every now and then life throws you a curveball and, like Ms Chappell, you have to run with it.
Take a friend of mine, who was working in the early hours of the morning in a cottage hospital. A patient turned up in advanced labour, and on vaginal examination my friend found, instead of a bony cranium, a soft and squidgy bottom. It was an undiagnosed breech, and this baby wasn’t hanging around for medical help to arrive. My friend had never even seen a breech delivery, so had to envisage the doll and pelvis of her midwifery training.
Another friend had to take over when the only doctor present felt ill while carrying out a diagnostic procedure. The patient was already distressed, and so my friend took over and finished the job quickly and efficiently.
Sometimes it’s personal. Another friend, a retired nurse, saved her husband’s life when, out of the blue, he had a cardiac arrest. They had to wait nearly two hours for an ambulance, 20 minutes of which she was administering CPR, and shocking him intermittently with a defibrillator. All on her own. I don’t know how she did it.
Resourcefulness of nurses
I could go on and on with examples of nurses getting on with it when the chips were down. It goes to show that we have knowledge, experience and common sense in spades. We are courageous and resourceful.
So why would anyone say, like I did, that they’re ‘just’ a nurse?
