Nurse Patient Quotes & Sayings

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality. — Sam Kean

Many young girls are ... becoming trained nurses,
whose gentle ministrations in the sick-room, skilled touch,
patient watchfulness and unwearied vigils,
are as great factors in the care of the sick,
as are the professional physicians. — Lydia Hoyt Farmer

Well, probably not with that drooling! She returns to the computer, intent on the paperwork - charting - she has to complete. The paperwork demands have steadily increased over time and the busier a nurse is with a very sick patient the more charting is required, even though she has less time to do it in. Computers should make the process faster, easier, but instead of efficiency, they enforce thoroughness. We're expected to chart almost everything, preferably in real time. Real time charting is impossible, though, if a patient needs a lot of immediate care. — Theresa Brown

Now it is not everybody, even amongst our respected friends and esteemed acquaintance, whom we like to have near us, whom we like to watch us, to wait on us, to approach us with the proximity of a nurse to a patient. It is not every friend whose eye is a light in a sickroom, whose presence is there a solace. — Charlotte Bronte

Once in a while a kind nurse will call me that there is a bed available in the ward from the unfortunate death of a patient.
They have cleared the bed and put a clean bed sheet on it.
That was good enough for me.
At last a bed to sleep in!
Who cares if some dead patient has just occupied it?
A bed was a bed.
I have no qualms about sleeping in the bed, with a ghost of a patient who has just departed. — Kenneth Kee

Too often a sister puts all her patients back to bed as a housewife puts all her plates back in the plate-rack-to make a generally tidy appearance. — Richard Asher

To Wordsworth nature was the nurse; to us, it's the patient. — Robert Hillman

James's general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is "by nature inferior to man. She is man's inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength"; she is, very properly, her husband's "patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass, his cook, his tailor, his own cheerful nurse and the sleepless guardian of his children." But their inferiority, James thought, is precisely what makes women attractive to men, so that any "great development of passion or intellect in woman is sure to prejudice" male attention. "Would any man fancy a woman after the pattern of Daniel Webster?"33 He consequently opposed serious education for women, a doctrine that had disastrous consequences in the case of his youngest child and only daughter, Alice. — Louis Menand

Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room. — Florence Nightingale

Nurses have new and expanding roles. They are case managers, helping patients navigate the maze of health care choices and develop plans of care. They are patient educators who focus on preventative care in a multitude of settings outside hospitals. And they are leaders, always identifying ways for their practice to improve. Because nurses have the most direct patient care, they have much influence on serious treatment decisions. It is a very high stakes job. Everyone wants the best nurse for the job, and that equates to the best educated nurse. — Judi Evans

I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public. — Peter Greenaway

[referencing African girls with no medical care while giving birth and the devastating fistulas they are left with untreated] Instead of receiving treatment, these young girls--often just girls of fifteen or sixteen--typically find their lives effectively over. They are divorced from their husbands and, because they emit a terrible odor from their wastes, are often forced to live in a hut by themselves on the edge of the village. Eventually, they starve to death or die of an infection that progresses along the birth canal. The fistula patient is the modern-day leper," notes Ruth Kennedy, a British nurse-midwife. — Nicholas D. Kristof

He rested his head on top of mine and whispered, "I'm warning you now. I'm a horrible patient."
I smiled in spite of myself and pulled back. "Of course you are. That's why you're a doctor. — Lisa Kessler

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion. — Florence Nightingale

There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient, "because it is not her business," I should say that nursing was not her calling. I have seen surgical "sisters," women whose hands were worth to them two or three guineas a-week, down upon their knees scouring a room or hut, because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power. But I do say that these women had the true nurse-calling - the good of their sick first, and second only the consideration what it was their "place" to do - and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them. — Florence Nightingale

And let me tell you something else, my friend," she said in the precise enunciation of a trained nurse talking to a worried patient. "It is all very easy for a man to talk about living in the present. Much more so than for a woman, who is liable to get knocked up higher than a kite every time the man enjoys himself in the present. Thats one thing I dont have to worry about, thank God. But there are a lot of others: such as what I am going to do when my husband kicks me out and then my lover throws me over when he has to support me, and me not being trained for anything but to be somebody's wife and having to do all my politicking and achieving and gain what little success I can by getting behind some stupid man and pushing him. — James Jones

In Turkey, you're not allowed to be left alone in the hospital. The nurse teaches the family how to do things, and somebody is always there with the patient. — Mehmet Oz

The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it — Maimonides

The patient suffers; the family threatens; the colleagues frown; the nurse laughs; Death grins; and the young doctor dances a crazy jig amid the tumult, though once he dreamed he would glide along the floor with Death in a perfectly controlled tango. — Bert Keizer

There's nothing here that's any different from any of the last dozen EKG readings," Patel said. "Patient scores a nine on the Glasgow scale, shows slow alpha-wave activity consistent with alpha coma. I think he was just talking in his sleep, Nurse. It even happens to gorks like this guy." "His — Joe Hill

Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing. — Florence Nightingale

A Health Affairs study comparing patient-satisfaction scores with HCAHPS surveys of almost 100,000 nurses showed that a better nurse work environment was associated with higher scores on every patient-satisfaction survey question. — Alexandra Robbins

Likewise, she will know that if I start watching reality TV, quoting Dr. Phil, riding roller coasters, and seem to have forsaken bacon in favor of anything soy - it's time to Get the Pillow. That's what - well, I can't tell you who but she's a nurse - says they all say when they've got a particularly cantankerous patient on their wing. — Jill Conner Browne

The English Patient' is about the coming together of a French-Canadian nurse, an English patient, a Sikh in a turban and me, Caravaggio, and each of us is seeking a resolution to our own problems. — Willem Dafoe

California nurse Jared Axen was holding a dying hospice patient's hand when he began to sing an old hymn. The woman, who didn't speak English, hadn't been responsive in days. But when Axen sang to her, she squeezed his hand, a response that soothed the woman's family. Six years later, Axen, a classically trained musician, sings to some of his patients every day. "It gives them their humanity back," he said. "Music is a common language that helps me connect with my patients." Many patients also claim to feel better and to need fewer pain medications, Axen said. "It's become a vital tool for my patients and their families. — Alexandra Robbins

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured.
I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience. — Jennifer Worth

Man who want pretty nurse, must be patient. — Confucius

A nurse has five seconds to make a patient like you and trust you. It's in the whole way you present yourself. I do not come in saying, 'I'm so sorry.' Instead, it's: 'I'm the hospice nurse, and here's what I have to offer you to make your life better. And I know we don't have a lot of time to waste. — Atul Gawande

I don't think of love in terms of relationships. It happens in terms of seconds, but it goes away like that, too. I pass a nurse, I love her, it ends when I go around a corner; at a restaurant I see a forlorn man at the table next to me, and I love him, and the conversation pulls me back, and it's ended. A patient comes in, and she is sick, and I love her, and then she dies, and I never see her again. This is what I live for. Don't think that it's sad. — Patrick Somerville

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness - it was scarred and worn beyond repair — Andrea Lochen

Compulsion, guilt, pick your poison.' Meaty shrugged. 'You make a better nurse than a patient. — Cassie Alexander

A nurse's aid threw the contents of a patient's water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, of of which, preparatory to flight released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while birds flew away, making sounds. — David Foster Wallace

It is the nurse who holds the hand of a patient without a family, who talks to them while they take their last breaths, who aches for them while they die alone. It is the nurse who cleans the patient's body, wipes away the blood and fluids, and closes his eyes. It is the nurse who says good-bye to the patient for the last time, she said. — Alexandra Robbins

By treating patients like customers, as nurse Amy Bozeman pointed out in a Scrubs magazine article, hospitals succumb to the ingrained cultural notion that the customer is always right. "Now we are told as nurses that our patients are customers, and that we need to provide excellent service so they will maintain loyalty to our hospitals," Bozeman wrote. "The patient is NOT always right. They just don't have the knowledge and training." Some hospitals have hired "customer service representatives," but empowering these nonmedical employees to pander to patients' whims can backfire. Comfort is not always the same thing as healthcare. As Bozeman suggested, when representatives give warm blankets to feverish patients or complimentary milk shakes to patients who are not supposed to eat, and nurses take them away, patients are not going to give high marks to the nurses. — Alexandra Robbins

I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient. — Ornette Coleman

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, "this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.' Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with a patient and open-minded spouse. — Mary Roach

The very fact that they were naturally caring and loving would be the milestone that weighed them down. The formula is perfect. The nurse becomes willing to sacrifice herself in the patient. But the patient isn't suffering from an external illness, he's suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The nurse wants to prevent him from this pain. The patient wants her to feel the pain, too. — Anonymous