I was stunned the other night when after hours of trying to get orders for a patient on a Medicine service, and finally getting in touch with the MD, he later came to my unit to apologize in person for having taken so long to get back to me. I work on a Surgical floor and mainly deal with surgeons. Medicine patients are tough but the teams of doctors who take care of them at my hospital are pretty much the bomb. I had a surgeon yell at me over the phone for not taking a verbal order once (something we are not allowed to do), and many many times I get no response from our Surgical teams at all. But In the words of a coworker, "Medical docs are like normal people."
Our surgical patients are sick but medicine is a whole other ball of wax. It gets a lot of flack and you'll notice many a nurse will cringe when the idea of working on a medical unit is mentioned. So I have to give props to these doctors for their awesome and caring attitude and their respect for nurses. They've got some very difficult patients but it doesn't seem to be bringing them down.
