Make Yourself the Office Nurse Every Doctor Craves

I’m not going to bore you with a lot of standard advice on how to do well in a job interview. You’re smart enough to wear professional clothing, minimize the skin showing, have a proofread (and spell-checked!) resume with personal references, etc. What I want to tell you is what doctors actually look for in an office nurse.

Why are so many office nurses plucked from the ranks of hospital floor staff, OR personnel, or ICU staff? Because doctors want a known and established quantity. Doctors spend more time with their office nurse than with their spouse and children combined. So it’s an important relationship. But unlike a friendship or a romance, there is a somewhat unique dynamic between doctor and office nurse that is not found in many other professional settings and certainly not in most social encounters.

Medical training is hierarchical, a lot like the military. This is especially true in the invasive specialties like surgery and Ob/Gyn. There is a commander-in-chief (the staff professor), generals (top level residents), colonels & captains (mid-level residents) and last and most certainly least, the dirt under the worm under the totem pole, the interns. So by the time years of humiliation, degradation and deprivation have passed and a trainee actually becomes an attending doctor, they want to feel like the boss. Like the pilot on a plane, they may be open to suggestion, but in the end, most of us docs want the last word. I know this is directly contradictory to most nursing training where nurses and doctors are shown to be health care professional colleagues, co-pilots or maybe captain and co-pilot.

So what does that have to do with getting an office job? Agreeable is good, constant questioning…. not so much. There are a lot of different ways to make suggestions; constantly questioning/second guessing/offering alternatives just to show how great your fund of knowledge is will get you nowhere but the door kicking your butt on the way out. Face it, our patients no longer respect doctors, lawyers certainly do not respect doctors, so when we go back to our “safe haven” our office-home-away-from-home, we want to feel (at least a little) special, maybe even king of the castle.