I am a nurse anesthetist at an unnamed busy hospital doing obstetric anesthesia. As with the rest of healthcare, a revolving door of nurses came and went during COVID. The turnover has been so grave that most or the new nurses are new, inexperienced and recent graduates.
While I am not disparaging lack of experience, some of these new RNs have been hired and are expected to work in an extremely high stress environment without proper orientation and competency checks, and a few are just not cutting it.
Instead of beefing up staffing, management has been laissez faire about the lack of knowledge and safety concern from the more experienced nurses.
Here comes the climax. A few of these incompetent nurses (not necessarily their fault) felt bullied by some of the older nurses (perhaps, but knowing whom, I doubt it). A couple of the older nurses were being singled out as scapegoats. This particular nurse was at the manager’s office getting a formal reprimand with a probation plan when a phone call from the director of nursing of the hospital came through because said nurse had won the hospital nurse of the year award.
TL;DR Nurse about to be on probation for being a “bully” by incompetent management receives hospital nurse of the year award.