Unfortunately there are situations and scenarios where staff are disrespectful to one another, sometimes this is intentional and other times it is not. The profession of Nursing is high stress and presents with multiple competing priorities throughout the shift, this can lead to frustration and burnout which can then come out as a behavior that is disrespectful towards a colleague.

I have experienced a RN speaking with a family and saying that if they have questions, to speak directly with the RN as the RPNs “just do meds”. This devalues the RPN role, knowledge and leads the families to believe the RPNs are just working to give out pills

Yes, I’ve seen it and have had it done to me. I find in LTC and in acute settings it’s done more. When working in the hospital, I started as a PSW then bridged to RPN. As both roles, I’ve seen nurses degrade the PSW as they are the one who are to always have eyes and ears on the patients, which is wrong, they continued to belittle and make the us PSW at the time aware that we are below them. I always told my friends and co-workers that if I were to ever become a nurse, I wouldn’t be the type of nurse that sat there, let bed alarm and bells ring, make my PSW do all the care for the patients and not help them.

When I became an RPN, I was talked down to by the RN’s as we are below them too. I felt that I knew nothing, even working in the environment and with my knowledge from school, so when asking for guidance and assistance, I was always told “you should know this”. It was very disheartening. I was always told too that the seasoned nurses “eat their young”, which in turn was true for some nurses. They didn’t want to help or felt they didn’t need to as they felt we needed to already know and understand everything that was happening with our patients. I explained to a fellow co-worker at the time, in school is much different then having a real life patient. People need to have patience with us new nurses as we aren’t as experienced and still learning.