Schedules and Job Responsibilities

• Nurses often have a daily schedule and a certain number of patients they must care for each day. These include making sure that patients take medication on time, bathing patients regularly, and periodically checking up on patient's vital statistics. Nurses use these scheduled visits to plan the structure of a day. Still, as unexpected events inevitably come up, strict schedules often change, and each nurse may find himself prioritizing new responsibilities.
  
  

Needs and Safety

• Many nurses follow psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when it comes to determining how to deal with all of the unexpected situations that come up. It is each patient's physiological needs and safety that nurses typically attend to first. When it comes to situations where multiple patients require the same level of care, nurses often follow an ABCD plan, an acronym that stands for Airway, Breathing, Circulation, and Disability. Thus, a nurse would assist a patient whose airway was obstructed before helping a patient with a circulation concern. It is not that one patient is more important than the other; rather, the severity of the medical condition is what dictates the actions that each nurse takes.
  
  

Requests

• Nurses naturally receive requests from patients throughout the day, and they might be everything from a patient's need for another pillow to something more serious, such as the removal of a medical device causing pain. In these instances, a nurse will often follow a similar assessment of the severity of the request and the amount of time at her disposal. If serious conditions must be dealt with first, it may take some time before comfort or convenience requests may be dealt with. Similarly, even when a patient requests something, nurses may not be at liberty to comply because of doctor orders.
  
  

Kindness and Comaraderie

• Many nurses may wish to comfort or even befriend their patients. Still, because of the fast-paced nature of the job and the sheer number of patients that some nurses must deal with, this level of human connection usually takes a back seat to the more pressing tasks of fulfilling the patients' necessities and maintaining their safety. Patients must understand the priorities the nurses have in order to better empathize with these often under-appreciated caregivers.