One person's treasure is another person's trash.

As a nurse, I find that I wonder, when faced with hardship, how one person perceives an act as brave and compassionate, whilst another perceives it as selfish and mean. How the stupidity of jumping to a conclusion, or taking something at face value, can ruin a lifetime of memories in an instant.

The older I get, the more intolerant I am of those who won't tell you the truth. The truth may hurt - but it is better out in the open and dealt with than festering within, which ultimately, hurts more, and has broader, more far reaching consequences than you might ever imagine.

The older I get, the more I see that, even things that should be straight forward truths, are open to subjectivity and perception, therefore misinterpretation.

(I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts this post will be misinterpreted *waves to WWIII* :-P)

I recently finished marking essays for nursing students.  Their assignment was to reflect on a clinical experience that they had on placement; choose a specific aspect, research it and present a written reflection in light of the supporting literature.  This was an eye opening experience.  It was obvious that some weren't really sure what they were reflecting on in their incident, and chose a pretty safe topic like the importance of communication in nursing.  (Just an aside - the irony of THAT situation killed me!  3000+ poorly written words on the importance of communication.. good grief!  It may be awesome that "kids today" can idevice, youtube, tweet and facebook - but regardless of the ability to use the technology and tell people what you think, if you cannot express yourself in writing, anyone reading your work/documentation/messages is gonna think you are a dumbarse.  Just sayin'.. Learn to write, people!  Seriously, it will put you a mile ahead of everyone else!  It is little wonder that nursing notes are not taken seriously by anyone.)

However, I digress.  Many of the students wrote about competence and critical thinking.  For a large percentage of those who did write about that, I would love to be a fly on the wall for their first 6 months in the real world of nursing.  From these one off incidents, they were deeming experienced nurses as incompetent and unable to think critically, mostly because they didn't do something the way that the student perceived it should have been done.  That is a tricky thing.  Most competency markers in nursing are about being able to perform to a tick box criteria.  And as one student wrote, many competencies are based upon self testing - (just a note - I haven't ever experienced self competency testing, as I suspect that it would rely heavily on an honour system - not that I am saying that nurses are not honourable - However.. I do know that there is a fair bit of "too busy to think about this" going on - and if your competency was not assessed by someone else, there would be a lot of "of course I am competent! -Tick!!")

Many of them talked about the criteria for critical thinking - but they did not seem to consider that you can only do what you can do at the time, within the scope of your practice and knowledge.  So it is all very well for someone to judge, in their safe place as a supernumerary student, but when you are responsible, trying to remember everything all at once, sometimes, something glaringly obvious to someone else, completely misses your attention. 

Even for myself, I recently worked with a nurse who made me feel like a new grad.  True, I have only worked a handful of shifts on this ward, but she took every opportunity during that shift to point out  my shortcomings.  She decided I was incompetent early in the shift, and then treated me as such for the remainder of the shift.  As a result, I spent the shift, second guessing everything I did, because she knew the routines, and many of the routines are still new to me, and I found that I conformed (subconsciously, of course).  All in all, not a pleasant experience.

You may not see the connection - I am not sure I can explain it - but I see way too much suffering because of pride, lack of courtesy and compassion.  A few years back, I planned to meet (or see off, I don't remember) my parents at the airport.  My brother scoffed at me, and asked me why I would do that.  I replied that it was a courtesy, and a nice thing to do.  He snorted and said "Yeah, you're good like that."

People are so caught up in themselves and what the world owes them, that they forget that it is two way.  If you want respect? you have to earn it.  You do not deserve respect for breathing, any idiot can do that: be a human being.