 What are we doing here people? It doesn't make any sense. Like who wants to see an unhealthy doctor? How hypocritical is that? Welcome back to the channel everybody. Today we are going to be talking about the unwritten rules of the hospital, little juicy stuff that no one ever talks about, but we are going to talk about today because many people are starting their first time in the hospital, whether it be a new third year medical student starting their clinical rotations, or a freshly minted doctor starting their intern year. And since these people are doing in the hospital, let's talk about the unwritten rules that you either have to learn on your own the hard way or you just watch this video and you know what to expect before you're doing the hospital. Let's go. Right, so unwritten rule number one, which could it be the most important rule of all? It might be and that is to always, always respect your nurses. Now I know there are a lot of people who have probably heard this, especially in med school, the nurses in your hospital can make or break you. When you are a freshly minted med student working in the hospital for the first time or a freshly minted doctor as an intern, your nurses will make or break your time there. And what I mean by that is some of these nurses have been there 10, 20, 30 years, they've seen the same interns come in year after year thinking they're hot, thinking they're, you know, they know everything in the hospital and these nurses, they're seasoned nurses. They know exactly what's going on in the hospital. They know how to take care of these patients. They've seen the same type of patients over and over again and you should treat them with the respect that they have earned. If you don't treat them with respects like you should everybody, but especially the nurses, you will pay for it in the long run. What I mean by that is I had some co-interns and co-residents along my way who thought they were, you know, tough big bad doctors in the hospital. They ran things now, not so much. They were putting their place pretty quickly. And what happens is the nurses will bother you constantly. They will pay you incessantly for dumb things because they want to mess with you. If you want to get sleep at night for working an overnight shift, but you're kind of a, you know what, to the nurses, they're going to wake you up all night. They're going to wake you up at 3am for a diet order or 3am. Can you please cancel this order? This is what happens. They mess with you and you're going to pay for it. So just be nice. I can't believe I have to say this, but be nice and be respectful to your nurses. They can teach you so much if you just give them the time. And keep in mind, the more mutual respect you all have with each other, the more likely you are to help each other when you need it. That comes in handy so many times. If you need a quick blood draw, if you need a quick medication, if you need help with an NG tube, you need an NG tube place. They're more likely to just do it to help you out if they see that you're busy versus if you treat them poorly. And they're just going to make your time there a little tougher. So just be nice to them and treat the nurses with respect. I promise you it'll work out in your favor. And while we're on the topic of respecting your staff, especially the nurses, you also, I can't believe I have to say this, you should respect all the ancillary staff as well. And who I mean by that is the technologist, whether it be the EKG tech that comes in to do an EKG on your patient, the nurse assistants who are worth their weight in gold, the radiology tech, and especially the custodial staff. I think it speaks of volume when providers get to know the custodial staff and the nursing assistants, because they're part of the team too. They do a lot of work behind the scenes to help patients, trust me. And if you're nice to them, they'll be nice to you. For example, if you go into a room and help a nursing assistant move a patient or help them clean up a patient, they will respect you so much and they will help you further on down the road if you need it, I promise. Same goes with custodial staff. I can't tell you how many times they've just been like, no, don't worry, doc, I'll take it from here when they didn't have to. It's just treat people with respect and you get respect back. It's that easy. The next unwritten rule in the hospital is to always load the boat, especially when you're first starting out as an intern. I used to hear this phrase so often, load the boat, whenever you're in trouble, load the boat. Didn't really know what that meant until I started intern year. And basically what that means is anytime something happens or even when you're starting to feel like you're getting in over your head, call people, senior to you, load the boat, make sure they're aware of the patient because a patient can decompensate like that if you don't act quickly. So for the people just starting out and just learning how to operate and manage patients in the hospital, it's better to go ahead and call your seniors so that they are on board before something happens. It's basically a way of saying be proactive instead of reactive. And there is kind of like another unwritten thing in the hospital where you don't want to ask for help too often because then your seniors will think that you don't know what you're talking about. But it's better to ask for help than let your ego get in the way. And that's the important takeaway. The next unwritten rule in the hospital is that patients always come first. I don't care if you had a lunch break from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. and you're gonna miss it now because your patient isn't doing well. I don't care. Your patient comes first. I don't care if you had an important date at 6.30 p.m. your shift ends at 6. And your patient started doing poorly at 5.50 p.m. and you have to stay late. I don't care. The patient always comes first. This is what we kind of signed up for and we knew going into this that this would happen. And that's what you gotta do. You have to take care of your patient. They are the number one priority while you're on shift. The next unwritten rule in the hospital is to never leave something for the oncoming shift. I see this a lot. You kind of wait, postpone things throughout the day. Maybe the patient needs to be transported to CT towards the end of your shift. Then you're trying to put it off so that the next shift has to do it. Maybe they need a central line and you don't want to do it or don't feel comfortable doing it. So you put it on to the night shift or whatever shift is coming on after you. That's no good. You should always take care of things on your shift during your shift. And if it's even getting close to the end of your shift, you should stay late to take care of said thing. My whole thing, especially with people coming on to the night shifts, you never want to leave stuff for the night shift. The night shift is just supposed to come on board. There's minimal people overnight. You don't want to rock the bow. It's basically just to keep things status quo until the morning shift comes around. All the people in the hospital come in and you get things going again. You don't want to be messing with things and getting into issues and having patients not do well overnight. If you can help it, you want to take care of everything during the day because that's the normal operating hours. So never leave stuff for the oncoming shift. Take care of everything before the next shift gets in or stay late if you have to. The next unwritten rule of the hospital or this is more of a written rule of the hospital and that is to always protect yourself because your safety is of utmost importance. I think it's easy once you get used to being in the hospital to kind of not wear gloves, not wear a face shield, not wear a mask when you need to. And you shouldn't get used to not protecting yourself because your protection is the most important thing. If you're doing anything that requires blood draw, wear gloves, wear a mask, wear eye protection. I can't tell you how many times I've either seen or almost seen people stab themselves with a needle when they didn't have gloves on or drawing blood when they didn't have gloves on and get blood all over their hands. You'll see a lot of those seasoned veteran providers and nurses. They don't really care, but especially as someone who's new in the hospital, you should really take these things serious. I personally, since I work with a lot of bodily fluids, intravascular procedure, blood draw on here, blood draw on there, I always wear eye protection, mask, obviously, and gloves because you should. Especially if you are a new med student and intern where you're not used to kind of using needles and all this stuff, it is so important for you to protect yourself. The next unwritten rule of the hospital is to always clean up after yourself, just like your mother told you. Now as providers, physicians, med students, everybody working in the hospital, we have our own separate work rooms that we do, all of our charting, all of our notes, all of our paperwork, all of our orders, talked about things, all that stuff. And the work rooms can become very messy over time because a lot of people don't treat it like they would their home. They're like, oh, it's just a hospital. I don't have to clean up after myself. But you do. And a clean workspace is everything. You should really treat it like your own home. Clean up after yourself. If you eat in that room, you share with other people, you should clean up after yourself. And again, I know this goes without saying, but you should see some of the work rooms that I've lived and worked in in the hospital, especially during intern year. You have like eight people in one room with six, seven, eight, 10 computers in there. Everybody eating lunch every day. Everybody bringing bandages, medical supplies here, throwing sutures. It just gets clustered. Everything scattered. There's food that's been in there for who knows how long. And the infamous thing I've always seen is that they're like packets of sauce from cafeteria or some other outside source. And who knows how long they've been there. Stay there for like years. So clean up after yourself in the work room, please. The next unwritten rule, the hospital is to always help out one of your colleagues. So this is kind of like non specific, but I'll give you an example. So when I was an intern, there were two overnight interns covering about, I don't know, 15, 20 patients each on surgery. If one intern had a patient not doing well and say that patient coded and they were completely busy the whole night, it's kind of like the unwritten rule to help out that other intern, if any of their other patients need anything while they were managing that code, because it takes up all of your time. They can't leave that code when a patient is not doing well to go do something for another patient. The kind of unwritten rule is to always help them out and they will be greatly appreciated of this. And also if the same thing happens to you and they help you, it's kind of like a quid pro quo kind of thing. You help them, they help you because it's a team environment. This is what people don't understand sometimes. Taking care of this many patients in the hospital when you're first started out, especially it's a team sport, help each other and it makes your life so much easier and less stressful. The next unwritten rule, the hospital is to treat every single patient like you would one of your family members. It's a good way to kind of keep things in perspective because it's easy to kind of disconnect or disassociate yourself from that patient personally. So treat them like you would one of your family members and you'll give them the best care that you can possibly give. All right. The next unwritten rule, the hospital is to dress well and just look presentable while you're at the hospital. Now I know what you're going to say, Michael, I was up all night on call. I got no sleeve. How am I supposed to do my hair? How am I supposed to just take a shower? Do your hair? Look presentable. It's not that hard. No patient wants to see a doctor come into their room looking like they, you know, we're just in a wind tunnel with their eyes like buddy and their hair is uncamped all skewed or like looks like they're like sleeping on one side of their head. Just look presentable for your patients. It's that simple. It sounds so much easier than it is because trust me, I've done these long stretches of call and it's hard to kind of get yourself together. But I think it's important and you have to look presentable for your patients because it's they're trusting you with their life. So they want to have someone who looks presentable and is trustworthy, not someone with bedhead and, uh, you know, non iron clothes or something. The next unwritten rule, well, it's not really an unwritten rule, the hospital, but I'll tell you anyways, because it kind of bothers me a little bit and that is to practice what you preach. If you are a physician and you're telling your patients to live a healthy lifestyle, you yourself should also live a healthy lifestyle. I can't tell you how many times I've gone out of the hospital and seen like a cardiothoracic surgeon smoking a cigarette on the street. Like what are we doing here people? How could you treat lung cancer and coronary artery disease and then go outside and smoke a cigarette? Like how hypocritical is that? Practice what you preach and your patients will respect you for that. Nobody wants to see a super unhealthy doctor. And it doesn't make any sense. Like who wants to see an unhealthy doctor? Just take care of yourself. Practice what you preach. The next unwritten rule hospital is to always be on time, especially if you work in shift work, your shift ends at six p.m. You work six and six p.m. The next shift goes six p.m. to six a.m. If you are not on time to your shift, that means the person who's already been there for 12 hours, for example, has to sit there for another 30 minutes an hour until you get there. It also means their sign out will be later and everything gets pushed back and sometimes they don't get paid for that extra time being on the shift. So be on time for your shift. I promise you your colleagues will love you for it. Actually, don't be on time. Be early. Be early to everything. That's a good rule of thumb. If you're on time, you're late. The last rule I will leave with you is kind of a joke, but it's still a good rule of the hospital and that is do not switch the rectal and oral thermometer probes. Good rule of thumb. So that includes all of the unwritten rules of the hospital. Please, I know you all have plenty of unwritten rules of your own or at your hospitals. I want you to please leave them in the comments below. I'm curious to see what everybody does at their unique hospitals or what other unwritten rules they have. So comment below with them. As always, keep it nice and civil in the comments as well. Keep in mind we all work together, so no need to get angry or be mean to one another. Make sure you smash that like and subscribe button, follow me on Instagram and TikTok. I'll be posting stuff on TikTok in the near future and I'll see you all on the next video. Peace.