Committing to a career in nursing

If you’re looking at the prospect of a career change, then it’s important to know what’s involved. There are many different kinds of careers in the health world. While it might not require quite as much education as becoming a medical doctor, becoming a nurse in a medical setting still requires commitment and certain values or traits you should be willing to embody. Here’s what you should know about a nursing career and how to prepare for one.

Do you care about nursing?

There are plenty of good reasons to get into a nursing career. It can be a reliable job if you find a placement that needs you and can offer decent benefits. There’s plenty of room to grow your career and nurses can make decent money when they reach some of the higher positions.

However, many nurses would agree that one of the most important things is that you get into nursing because you have a passion for it. Whether the medical side of the career interests you or you join because you want to provide care for those who need it, it can be a grueling and challenging career in many ways, so having some kind of care for the work you do can be important for getting you through the more challenging aspects.

Know there are different types of nurses

Before you set off on the path to making sure that you can be the best nurse that you can be, you should ensure that you know what kind of role you’re getting into, first and foremost. There are different nursing positions, as shown on the SNHU website.

A nursing assistant is mostly responsible for non-medical care, such as monitoring vital signs and bathing and dressing patients. Meanwhile, a registered nurse does this as well as helping to administer medications and treatments.

Then there are more specific roles such as home care nurses, which help with a wide range of daily living needs at home, as well as surgical assistant nurses, which help assist surgeons and provide patient care throughout the procedure.

Getting the necessary qualifications

As mentioned already, becoming a nurse doesn’t require you to do quite as much education as a doctor would have to go through. However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need any education at all. The first thing that you should look at is getting a nursing degree from Keystone Healthcare Studies or similar educational organizations.

From there, what kind of nurse you want to become will dictate what kind of education you need. Some positions, like becoming a registered nurse, require a diploma as well as a state license, while becoming a certified nursing assistant (or CNA) only requires that you pass a competency exam and gain a state license.

For most people, becoming a registered nurse is what you would consider the typical nursing career.

You need good communication skills

Whatever position you get into, it’s the truth that the nurse is the primary point of contact for patients, often much more than doctors. You might not be giving the patients the diagnosis or describing their treatment for them. However, you’re going to have to be their advocate, which means listening to them and talking to their doctor about their needs.

You’re also going to have to file reports on the patient’s condition and what care you provided. As such, learning some communication skills can be very important for a nurse, indeed. Otherwise, it can be difficult to get the trust that you need from your patients or the good working relationship you need with the rest of the medical team.

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Communication with the doctor is important, too

When we talk about communication skills, it’s not just about spending time with the patient and ensuring their needs are being met and their concerns are being heard. You’re also going to have to spend a lot of time communicating with doctors, which requires both good verbal skills as well as the ability to maintain a positive working relationship.

One of the most important skills for any nurse when working with a doctor is to deliver information as efficiently as possible, as doctors have just as much strain on their time as nurses do.

Punctuality and organization are key

Hospitals and medical practices can be pretty hectic places to work in, at times. They are high-pressure environments for everyone that works there but any nurse can tell you that they get the lion’s share of the pressure when it comes to their time.

As such, you’re likely going to have to get used to running to a very tight schedule, indeed, which means that you need to make sure that you have good time management skills. Being late to work or not taking the time to respond to patient needs can lead to poor quality of care.

You need to learn important time management skills such as how to prioritize your different duties, how to be flexible, and how to schedule your day so that you can arrive early and be ready to jump in when your shift starts.

Giving the right image

Nurses come in all shapes, all sizes, and genders. However, regardless of your physical attributes, you still have to make sure that you’re able to represent your team and your practice or hospital with the kind of professionalism that patients expect from those who are in charge of their health care.

You should make sure that you take care of your appearance, groom yourself well, and always have spare uniforms available. Given how easily you can get messy in a nursing career, having spare Cherokee scrubs from Uniform Advantage on hand is always going to be recommended.

Even on busy days, you have to make sure that you’re groomed enough to be a pleasant and helpful presence to your patients.

Continual dedication to learning

If you look at the prospect of the education that you need to become a nurse as nothing more than a temporary obstacle, then it might well be the case that you’re not as well suited to the career as you would like to be.

Nurses have to stay up to date with medical regulations and practices, which can change pretty rapidly, especially in response to new threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve seen recently, or the AIDS crisis that was spreading in the 80s. You need to be able to keep up.

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Ambition can be helpful

A lot of people have a false impression that once you start a career as an RN or in any other nursing career, you’re going to be working the same job for decades if not the rest of your life.

There’s no denying that you can find a reliable position in these roles. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s no room to grow your career beyond your first job, either. There are advancement opportunities for nurses as shown at Indeed, whether it means specializing in certain kinds of nursing, such as occupational health nursing or research nursing.

You can also climb higher with the structure that you are already working in, such as becoming a nursing supervisor or manager.

The ability to manage stress

Should nurses be under as much pressure and stress as they tend to be? No, almost definitely not. However, it does have to be acknowledged that nursing is a high-pressure role that puts demands on your time as well as self-sacrifice.

You have to be able to manage stress to avoid burning out entirely. This doesn’t mean just ignoring your personal needs, either, you should try to learn what work-life balance skills you can to make sure that nursing does not intrude on your life to the degree that it becomes unmanageable. Otherwise, it can begin to affect your quality of life as well as the quality of care that you give your patients.

The ability to handle difficult situations

As a nurse, you’re going to have to deal with the kind of delicate and difficult subject matter that people tend to encounter rarely in their life. For you, it’s going to be a daily occurrence.

This includes, of course, all of the grisly details of illness and injury, so you need a strong stomach (and some people do develop this over time.) You are also going to be dealing with death, bereavement, and other heavy topics and emotions from your patients and their families. The best way to deal with this isn’t to become an automaton, but most nurses find that some level of compartmentalization is important to ensure their mental and emotional health.

This guide, as many points as it might cover, is not comprehensive. A lot of people who get into nursing find that the job can shape every aspect of their lives. You have to be willing to make that commitment when you start down this path.

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