Transcript: New Nurse Practitioner: When You Don't Know the Answers

Liz Rohr:
Well, hey there, it's Liz Rohr from Real World NP, and you're watching NP Practice Made Simple, the weekly videos to help save you time, frustration, and help you learn more faster so you can take better care of patients.

So today I want to talk to you about a really common fear that I hear from new nurse practitioners and nurse practitioner students, and it's the fear of not knowing the answers, especially when you're in the room with a patient. And in this video, I'm going to talk to you about why it's okay and maybe it should even be celebrated. And I'm also going to talk to you about the simple strategies that I use to handle this.

There's so many reasons why this is okay.

Number one is that whether you're a brand new nurse practitioner or you've been a nurse practitioner for 20 years, you are going to see things every day that you've never seen before, or at least most days.

Maybe at 20 years ... I don't know, I don't have 20 years of experience, but I imagine even four years in, I'm seeing things I've never seen before, symptoms, questions, complaints, all that. And that's just part of the job. You know that meme from a couple years ago? I'm a big fan of memes, and there was one a couple years ago that was like, "Nurse practitioners, what I actually do, what my parents think I do, what my patients think I do," with all those pictures. I can include a link below if you haven't seen it, if you're not a big meme person. But the gist of it is that what you actually do is very different from what people perceive that you do. I know when I graduated, at first, people would ask me all these questions and I'd be like ... Like friends and family members and all that. And people don't necessarily know what we do, which is we're prepared with the skillset and the knowledge base to handle things, but we're not walking textbooks and nobody is. And physicians aren't either.

One of the big points I want to make here is that this has been my experience so far. When people seek healthcare, when they go to the doctors, when they go to see a nurse practitioner, what they really want most of the time is to be listened to, to feel heard, and to feel cared about with somebody who wants to do a good job and help them feel better. That's the number one thing that most people want. Most people are not walking into the clinic looking for somebody who is a wiz with, like I said, a walking textbook wiz that can just rattle off information. That's not what people are looking for. And the very fact that you're watching this video tells me that you care and your patients are going to feel that from you, whether or not the answer right away. You're going to get people who care who are going to give you some looks and some eye rolls. And that's also okay too because you are not for everybody. I am not for everybody. There is nobody in this world that is going to be liked or compatible with everybody.

I have patients who drive an hour to come see me for a visit, follow me between health centers, and I don't even give them pain meds. And I also have patients that say they're going to sue me and that I'm the worst ever and they never want to see me again. So that's just real life. The last reason why this is really okay and we should probably celebrate it, is that every first patient visit is terrible. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones where it's not terrible. But you know what? You're not going to get better at seeing if it's an otitis media, like the TM is normal, you're not going to get better at talking with patients and obtaining patient histories until you do it. You can't get to the 50th one until you've done the first one. And so let's just celebrate it. This is a milestone.

You did it, you've gotten it over with if it's already happened to you, and it's going to keep happening and it's going to keep getting easier, I promise. So enough about that. I want to get to those simple strategies that I recommend.

So number one is just being honest. This is my fallback, because like I said, people just want to feel cared for. So when you say to them, "You know what? I'm not sure." Or, "I really don't know off the top of my head." If they are asking a question that you learned in school but you just don't remember. One of my go-to lines is, "So I'm going to take a moment. I'm going to take a look at your chart and I'm going to come up with a plan." And most people, if you say it confidently like that, they don't bat an eye. they're not like, "What?" Most people don't care because they just want to feel cared for.

So that's my personal code word for, "I'm going to scour Up-to-Date really quickly and ask my colleagues because I'm really not sure what to do." So I go, I do that, and I come back in the room and I'm like, "Okay, so what we're going to do is this," and people really don't care.

I'd love to hear from you. What's the strategy that you use to handle those kinds of situations? Or what is one of the insights, the major insights that you took away from this video?

Did you like this video? If so, hit like and subscribe and share with your NP friends so together we can reach as many new grads as possible to make the first year as easy as we can make it. And don't forget to check out realworldnp.com and sign up for the email list. You'll get these videos straight to your inbox every week with little notes from me and some bonus content that I just don't share anywhere else. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.