Nursing Careers
| Nurses help take care of patients and treat illness. |
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Nurses have a wide variety of duties depending on their specialty, but there are some things common to all nursing jobs.
All nurses deal with patients in some way, and are called upon to provide care to them and support to other medical professionals. Consequently, nurses have to be familiar with many different symptoms and diseases, drugs, treatment programs, medical terminology and devices, and more. |
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The Life of a Nurse
Many nurses are charged with instructing patients and their family members with how to treat or manage their injuries or illnesses. This means you’ll need to be very familiar with these illnesses and how they should be treated. You may also need to administer treatment yourself, including giving shots, drawing blood or inserting an IV line. In addition, nurses often take vital signs and gather other information from patients such as listing their symptoms, weighting them, examining them for signs of illness, etc.
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Nurses can also specialize in many areas – something that often means more education. In fact, you may need to take several more years of classes for some specializations. Nurses can specialize in four different ways – specializing in treatments or work settings (like an operating room nurse), specializing in specific conditions (like in diabetes or nutrition), specializing in a body system type (heart care, for example), or specializing in working with one specific type of patients (children or the elderly). It’s even possible to combine two of these specializations, such as a nurse who focuses in working with children who have cancer.
It’s possible for nurses to specialize even more. A nurse who specializes in work settings, for example, might further specialize in providing health care over the phone, working in a trauma unit, or working with an ambulance or medical helicopter crew. Nurses who focus on diseases could further focus on helping patients with addictions, with disabilities, or with specific illnesses. The options and specializations are numerous, but again, all require extra education and training.
Of course, a nurse isn’t required to specialize. Nurses who choose not to focus on one specific area typically become staff nurses and assist physicians and others in providing care. They may find it fulfilling to work with such a wide variety of patients in a range of medical situations. Today, however, being a staff nurse is almost a specialization in and of itself. The profession requires you to know a lot of information about many different areas of nursing, even those whose jobs don’t put them in direct contact with patients.
If you’ve ever been to a hospital, you’ve seen the type of work environment most nurses are in. It’s well-lit and comfortable for the most part, but you'll be around that “hospital smell” a lot. If you focus on home health, you'll probably spend a lot of time working with patients in their homes, so your work environment will change often. In either case, you'll need to be comfortable working with patients in failing health and tending to various bodily functions. You'll also have to learn to handle patient deaths, especially if you choose to specialize in a field like oncology or trauma.
The benefits of nursing are many – especially if you enjoy working with others – but there are some hazards, of course. You'll be in close contact with patients who have illnesses, so you'll have to be very cautious when it comes to staying clean. You may be on your feet for hours at a time as well, and you may be required to work longer shifts than you're used to. However, most nurses agree that seeing the smile on the face of a patient who has made a recovery is well worth these risks.
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