Do “new nurses” scare you, too?

Lately I find myself becoming quite the cynic. I’m not a cynical nurse, I’m just discovering things throughout my ‘world’ that are cause for cynicism. Well, not everything in my world. Mostly the new nurses.

Now remember, I haven’t even been a nurse a decade yet! And here I am remembering the “good old days” of nursing. Scary. I know.

I guess what gets under my skin is I’m finding more and more ‘newer’ nurses who think they know everything. OR they think they’ve experienced everything simply because they’ve been a nurse ‘long enough’, to see the ‘same thing’ more than once. Complacency can infect all of us at one time or another. We get so comfortable with repetition that we find safety in it, and then we find braggadocio. I’ve been doing this for a mere seven years, and to this very day, I still learn something new, or appreciate a new concept every day.

I cannot shake the feeling that the ‘newer’ nurses scare me just a little. This hollow, yet inflated, ego is going to get them in trouble. So much trouble that I often wonder if their patients will suffer.