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Comment by hnzix | Hacker News Reader

Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital. Doctors get status and respect, but often it's the nurse keeping you alive by monitoring drug interactions and physical readouts that a busy or overconfident doctor has missed.

Never say someone is "just a nurse". It's a hardcore and highly technical job where one mistake can kill a patient and end the nurse's career.

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I think nurses do get a lot of respect in the hospitals I've worked in. You certainly wouldn't be long tolerated if you were dismissive to them, at least.

It's higher variance than you're implying. Some nurses are angels, some are... not. This shouldn't be surprising, given that nurses are human just like the people who work in any other profession.

I spent a lot of my childhood in hospitals. After a few years of fighting, my situation almost stabilized. Until a high ranking doctor decided to do an experiment on me, which eventually cost me all of my eye-sight. From my side, nurses get 10x more respect then doctors.

> Doctors get status and respect, but often it's the nurse

I don't buy this, because the "nurse who knows more than the residents" has been a stock character for a while. Nurses haven't been unsung for most of this century.

If anything, the perception has totally flipped, and another stock character (at least in the US) are doctors as "yes-men" and "butchers", preoccupied with getting back to playing golf, who only know how to prescribe a pill because the drug rep advertised it to them.

Nurses are lionized, and almost no one is saying "just a nurse" anymore:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/274673/nurses-continue-rate-hig...

Oftentimes nurses have to choose between sacrificing themselves or another human in massively profit optimized enterprise to keep someone alive or to let that person suffer to make management realize certain shortcomings of that system.

Keep in mind that unless nurses keep their work/life boundaries there is actually no way for numbers oriented management to realize issues within certain doctor run departments.

It isn't that different from other corporations per se, but in the case of the nurses they have to choose between letting a patient suffer consequences for the sake of transparency or not. It is a moral dilemma.

Nurses pretty much run my local hospital.

This hospital might the be the only place, I have seen, where doctors egos are put in check. Maybe too much?

I remember feeling sorry for this one doctor, whom seemed like a decent guy.

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