It’s usually a team effort. Usually when we’re disagreeing it’s some tiny little thing like how much sedation or pain or anxiety medication is needed, or which specific modality of treatment is indicated for something. The pain and anxiety thing can also go either way, sometimes it’s the nurses wanting more meds for the patient and sometimes they’re thinking less should be used and same for the doctors. And the other common disagreement is usually a disagreement of statistics vs lived experience, so the doctors are looking at the big picture of how things play out across large populations in places across the country or even world, vs nurses are thinking more in terms of their specific population and environment and what their specific team is trained and experienced at pulling off. Big picture vs individualized. There’s also some overlap though, they’re pushing more nurses especially in higher ed to learn more about stats and they’re pushing doctors to individualize things to their patients and teams.

This is all to say that there are a lot of extreme moments where we’ll both just look at each other like what in the actual fuck is happening. We don’t always agree on the exact solution but we can usually at least come to a rapid consensus that what is currently happening is unacceptable.