Career Paths in Nursing

So, you plan on making your career in nursing. Well, you need to think about it long and hard. Although nursing seems like a simple enough decision, the span of the profession is quite wide in today’s society. A nurse can range from an LPN in a hospital setting that seems more like an aide than a nurse to an Advanced Practice Nurse Practitioner who will seem more like a doctor.

Nurses do patient care, but they also work as administrators in hospitals, public health, and long-term-care facilities. Nursing can also lead to a career path that ends as a teacher of future nurses.

Many nurses today start out as traditional nurses doing patient care and passing out medications. Because of the opportunities for growth and advancement in many areas of nursing, most nurses continue their education throughout much of their career and move into areas that are a little removed from direct care. Nurses can become more involved with the management and paperwork end of the job.

Some nurses are drawn toward the obstetrics side of the field. In this area, you can be involved with labor and delivery even to the point of becoming a licensed midwife. Other nurses choose to move more toward the after-delivery care of the newborns in either the nursery or the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit. Both of these areas are extremely rewarding and can be quite competitive to gain entry into them.

Long-term care is another field that draws many nurses. They find that they enjoy the daily interaction with the residents over longer periods of time. This allows relationships to build. These facilities when ran correctly can seem more like large extended families than health care facilities. The drawback to this field is that these residents are often elderly and each year some die within the facility. It takes a special person to be able to feel like they have succeeded if when a resident dies, the nurse can take comfort that the care they helped give made someone’s life better than it might have been during the final few years.

Intensive care is the field for nurses who want to stay on the leading edge of where medical science works. In these units, many patients receive state-of-the-art care with highly sophisticated equipment. It is generally fast paced and mentally challenging. The rewards come when you realize that because of your work, someone received a chance at life that may not have otherwise.

Nurses who work in the psychological field must be prepared to deal with personalities that range from catatonic to dangerous. Learning how to deal with the diversity in this field is the greatest challenge. Many nurses find this to be the best field to work with once they adapt to the various moods and personality disorders that are encountered daily.

A nurse who desires to move up the ladder can choose to return to school and become a Nurse Practitioner. There are many areas of practice that fall under this umbrella. You can specialize in family practice, ob/gyn, psychological nursing, or a host of other areas. The advantage of this advanced practice license is that you function much like a physician. Nurse practitioners in most places have to be monitored by a licensed physician. They still have a wide range of things that can be done. In this field, you can write most prescriptions, diagnose illness, and even do minor surgeries all without being directly supervised by a doctor. Many states are looking into allowing nurse practitioners to be able to establish their own independent practice.

With masters degrees and doctorates, nurses become masters of their domain. Many run institutions that employ nurses and doctors. They can teach the next generation of nurses based on their wide experience and expertise. The nursing field is extremely wide open to innovation. A good nurse can name his or her price, pick a field of specialty, and find work almost anywhere or anytime.