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| Image Source: mensliberty.com |
The hospital hierarchy was established to promote order among personnel, and to offer a solution to who has the final say on particular cases. Because their training gives doctors the authority to make diagnoses and other major medical decisions, nurses are often seen as the inferior of the two.
But there is little reason to belittle the medical knowledge held by nurses. After all, they were educated just as much as doctors were, and therefore possess a level of medical knowledge roughly similar to many physicians. They even act as the “final check” whether a doctor’s decision is right or not.
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| Image Source: menliberty.com |
However, there are cases when the boundaries of the individual duties of nurses and doctors collide and overlap, causing conflict. For instance, a nurse may notice something wrong with a prescription. While solving this sort of issue typically takes nothing more than asking the doctor to correct the prescription, the mechanics of hospital hierarchy is not as simple as that.
Many doctors think of themselves as superior to nurses. Most of the time, they are favoured by the hospital administration. For a nurse to question a doctor’s decision takes more than guts—it requires being prepared to lose a job. As physician Otis Webb Brawley observed in his book, “To throw this kind of challenge, you have to not mind being unemployed.”
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| Image Source: akronchildrens.org |
Needless to say, this causes a number of problems for patients, including delay and errors in the delivery of treatment. This is all the more reason for the mechanics of hospital hierarchy to be fixed.
A former hospital administrator at Newman Regional Hospital in Emporia, Kansas, Terry Lambert is fully aware of the effective ways to promote harmony in a hospital environment. Check out this Facebook page for more discussion on health care.
