Elliott Schottland, Medical Student, says:
The discussion about nursing and doctoring reminded me of conversations I had with fellow classmates at school. We were studying for the NBME Behavioral Sciences exam and joking about the ethical dilemma practice questions we were working on. A common theme that we noticed is that any answer involving soliciting a nurse for help or consulting with a nurse would invariably be wrong. We agreed that answers involving nurses can be crossed off and it would be nice to get one on the test because we could narrow down the answers easier. Almost like how there used to rarely be positive depictions of minorities in the cinema, early medical education is nearly void of positive depictions of nurses. The best way to effect change in medical school is to test students on the material. This should be applied to learning about hospital hierarchy and inter professional awareness. If we can learn about the citric acid cycle it’s certainly fair game to test us on how well we can utilize the resources of the hospital and work on a team.