I love this show and its attempt to be realistic, but I am not happy with the writers on this one with regard to the Shaun and the bitch nurse issue and all that radiates from it.
I have a different perspective than many and I am thus "pulling rank" so you either accept my knowledge and experience or just say I am a loon while I laugh at you for not getting it.
Big hospital dirty politics is very well known; I worked at one for two decades. It's a turf war between the nurses and the doctors and the nurses always win, even if they are horrible.
It's very hard to get a nurse fired, and some of them are goldbricks and worse, and game the system knowing they can't get fired unless they do something seriously bad, or even get caught stealing supplies/drugs, etc. And this is of course causing needless blame for GOOD nurses, who are the majority, but it's the old one bad apple spoils the barrel, etc.
The nurse is deliberately busting his chops and being unprofessional trying to distract him. She is as bad as the doctors who also don't want him there, and perhaps there is an undercurrent of conspiracy to get rid of him just because.
But make no mistake about it, because it is a turf war, there is always some senior nursing staff supervisor who will complain about a doctor, right or wrong, and they won't check to see if one of their own is really a little bitch from hell giving the others a bad name. The only way that happens is if another nurse complains to their common nurse-boss, etc.
Dr Lim is NOT a good manager of the situation. Why? Because she didn't tell Shaun the reality of this situation, essentially that he has to placate the bitch nurse because she is powerless to help him. Instead of warning him, she BLAMES him. Maybe from her point of view this expediently solves this particular problem, but she has no business being in that position and not being aware that what happened to Shaun is inconsistent with who Shaun is. Confidentially, she should explain WHY they have to placate the bitch, and that once he is a complete graduate experienced surgeon, THEN he can have ANYONE summarily thrown out of his operating room for ANY reason or even any non-reason, but right now he is "low man on the totem pole" and has to kow-tow, etc. AND instead of making him apologize, just ignore here, it won't help and offer to talk to her nurse-boss counterpart about the reality of the troublemaking going on on the part of the bitch nurse, etc. It would start a process such that if this repeats too many times, the nurse-boss would finally have to take disciplinary action against her, of course in a closed-door way because after all, we have to make sure we totally control all of the doctors, etc.
Ask any doctors, such as my personal friends, who went through internship in a big-city hospital about how you have to make nicey-nicey with the nurses to avoid being kicked out, etc. And again, most of them are fine and knowledgable, and you see shows where the nurses tell the new doctors what to do, this is all fine and reality, but we are talking about coddling a goldbrick trouble-making bitch in particular.
Thus, Shaun how has to swallow all of his pride, and he does have well-deserved pride because he really is that good. Some people "accuse" me of having Asperberger's merely because I am deliberately non-diplomatic because I don't give a shit. I don't suffer fools and thankfully for the most part I don't have to. Also, I have brilliant friends who actually are autistic, but they are street-smart enough when talking to me to understand corruption and the consequences of it, etc.
Dr. Lim just confused Shaun by not telling him the truth, and he is just plain confused about "somehow" he did something he has to apologize for.
Now, to be sure, if Shaun had more of a personality like the egotistical Melendez, Lim's boyfriend and they are trying to one-up each other, then he could make some pushy snarky remark to chew out the bitchy nurse, and that would be OK with Lim, but she is there to make sure his career succeeds, and not derail it with needless blame. Take Shaun into her confidence that the nurses can ruin doctors UNFAIRLY and they can't help it. To apologize to her just empowers her to do more crap on Shaun, etc.
Because he is not senior staff, he cannot make a complaint about bitch-nurse, but Lim should have done so at least privately with the nurse-boss counterpart and assured Shaun that yes, he has to not make waves, and that sometimes you have to pretend you are at fault, but also assure him that in this case, they cannot do much but she is having his back, etc.
Lastly, I was a patient in one of these hospitals quite recently. and there was this twerp floor doctor who treated me like shit. I asked a friendly nurse for the phone extension of the nurse-director who oversees that particular group of nurses in that ward. I had a nice conversation with her and quite quickly, I ruined his day. In the end, either he will learn his lesson and become a better doctor OR he will quit and the practice of medicine will be better off without him. Thus, as a clever PATIENT I manipulated and gamed the same system.
Thus, my take on the show is Lim did not do right by Shaun and needlessly confused him. Clearly she was explaining the dynamic that he could have a black mark on his permanent record, yet chose to also confuse him and in essence becomes the bad manager who caves. She is therefore not all that good, although she means well.
Last point, an analogy to baseball. The famous team manager Leo Durocher is the source of this well known advice: Nice guys finish last.
