Nurses do indeed have a sixth sense. No, I didn’t misspell “sick” sense. I mean, we have an instinct that civilians don’t have.

The nursing “sixth sense” is that moment when your gut gets those “butterflies,” or when A plus B does not equal C.

It’s a part of that ever-important skillset of critical thinking, but it’s also a separate entity altogether. Maybe you can call it a form of ESP:

ESP is also sometimes casually referred to as a sixth sense, gut instinct or hunch, which are historical English idioms. The term implies acquisition of information by means external to the basic limiting assumptions of science, such as that organisms can only receive information from the past to the present.

So. ESP. It’s one of those skills that seasoned nurses just “have.” I’m not sure if it’s something we witness, repeat, learn, see, or simply acquire through experience. Maybe it’s just that tried and true “learn as you go” skill? Honestly, I really don’t know how it’s acquired, I just know it exists.

In fact, I’m more sure than ever after this past semester of classes. This “instinct” was referenced several times during my clinical rotation and during a couple lectures in the nurse practitioner program I’m attending.

The question was posed, “Does the patient look sick?”

……. follow the link to read the rest:

via Nurses and their sixth sense | Scrubs – The Leading Lifestyle Nursing Magazine Featuring Inspirational and Informational Nursing Articles.

A recent post from over at Scrubs Magazine. Any thoughts???

Robert Galbraith / Reuters

Nurses participate in a one day strike at a hospital in Burlingame, Calif. on December 22, 2011. The strike affects 2,000 RNs at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, and 4,000 RNs who work at nine Bay Area facilities that are part of the Sutter Health Corporation. The nurses are protesting what they call unsafe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios and increases in their health care premiums.

Thousands of California nurses stage a one-day strike

The National Nurses United website reports – Voicing concern over the erosion of quality of care and cuts to patient protections, nurses are on a one-day strike today at California’s second largest private hospital and one of its most profitable corporate hospital chains.

RNs have been at odds with hospital management for months over assuring there is safe RN-to-patient staffing at all times, and over the hospital’s refusal to implement safe patient lift policies to prevent accidents to patients and injuries to nurses, despite enactment of a state law requiring such policy.

Long Beach nurses will also protest hospital demands for sweeping increases in healthcare premiums for nurses. The health care takeaway the hospital is pushing would cost RNs nearly $3,000 more out of pocket in premium costs, even though the hospital’s costs for nurses’ health coverage have not risen. Read more…

via PhotoBlog – Thousands of California nurses stage a one-day strike.

I hope their voices get heard.