Office staff rant

A tough thing about being newFNP (or supervising MD or co-worker NP) is that there are no other employees in the clinic as responsible or as knowledgable as you. In some ways, that's fine. In other ways, it makes newFNP want to yell at people and throw her pens at them.

NewFNP's biggest pet peeve in not having labels in the chart.

NewFNP is the third stop in the clinical flow. First stop - front desk. Second stop - MA/vital signs. Third stop - newFNP.

As evidenced by the above written flow chart, here are at least two people ahead of newFNP who can open the chart and see that there are, in fact, no labels. Ultimately, the front desk needs to take a split fucking second and look in the chart. Are there labels? No? Print them out!

Ten minutes later, when the MA writes down the chief complaint and sees that there is no label with which to identify the patient on a new progress notes page, she then has the opportunity to ask the front desk to print out some labels.

Now, newFNP is not sure how often the aforementioned scenario occurs, but she is quite sure that it did not happen three times today, a day in which newFNP was responsible for the care of thirty-four patients. On such a day, newFNP finds it difficult to be polite when wasting precious minutes of her time to go do someone else's job. It is not as though newFNP has neglected to mention this ever-present need for labels to all clinical staff during weekly staff meetings. To the contrary, time and time again, newFNP has pleaded with her co-workers to throw her a fucking label bone. Alas, no.

Ranking second on newFNP's list of pet peeves is incomplete or an absolute lack of lab results in the chart when a patient's clearly stated CC is "lab results." Should it ever happen? No. Should it happen daily? Hell no. Does it? Shit, yes it does. This causes newFNP to hunt down her MA and request the results. Sure, newFNP could find them faster herself, but fuck that just on principle.

There are many other things our MA's miss. Some of it a simply a lack of knowledge and newFNP is not going to fault them for having next to no education. However, newFNP attributes a decent amount of MA oversights to sheer laziness. And newFNP is pissy about that. NewFNP has struggled all year with the fact that she is working like she is on the chain gang all day long while she sees other employees looking on MySpace and taking 10 minutes to figure out from which fucking fast food restaurant everyone wants to order lunch.

Being at the top of the intellectual food chain in one's community health clinic is at times a welcome responsibility and a frustrating burden. NewFNP sincerely believes that it would not take much effort on the part of other staff to ease the workload of the clinicians. Sure, we'll see the 25-30 patients per day. Just make it a frigging smidge easier on us.

Geez!