“Who As Room 19?”

“Who has room 19?”

Recently my office was moved from a hallway to a patient unit. Like across the hall from my office now, are patient rooms. Last week I was sitting in my office, doing my thing, when I heard a physician walk by and call out, “Who has room 19?”

I kinda chuckled.

What I wanted to do in that moment was to do what I had done a few times with physicians in the ED. I wanted to walk him over to the whiteboard where the assignments are listed, and “introduce” him to it. In this case, I didn’t really know this physician and didn’t think it would go over very well, but still it was funny.

As I thought about it a little longer, I was struck by how similar the things we face in nursing are, regardless of where we are. You see the ED where I would “introduce” physicians to the whiteboard was in a different hospital, more than an hour from my current hospital. Oh, and more than a decade has passed since I last worked in that ED.

This is important for us to understand because it reminds us that we are not alone. The difficulties that we face are being faced by many other nurses around the country and the world. This doesn’t make the problems go away, but sometimes it helps to know that we are not the only one’s struggling through the same sort of stuff.