3 Great Career Choices For Registered Nurses

If you’re looking for a career that gives you the opportunity to help others, nursing is one of the best options out there.

Caring for patients and helping them on their journey towards recovery is so rewarding and you’ll get a lot more job satisfaction than you would with most other careers.

Career Choices For Registered Nurses

There are some downsides to nursing because it can be a very emotionally charged job and some people aren’t equipped to deal with that.

Some of your patients won’t get better and when you’ve been seeing them every day, you form a relationship with them. If you lose them, it can take a big emotional toll on you.

The shift patterns and hours can be quite unsociable as well so if you’re looking for a standard 9 to 5 schedule, nursing probably isn’t for you.

But if you think that you’re the type of person that can deal with those challenges, you’ll get a lot out of a nursing career.

When people start out on a nursing degree, they don’t always have a clear idea of exactly which area of nursing they want to move into and they might not be aware of how many different career options there are.

Working as a nurse on a ward is what most people picture but that’s not the only thing that you can do with a nursing degree.

If you’re considering a career in nursing but you don’t know exactly what you want to do, these are some of the different jobs you could look into.

Children’s Nurse

An adult nurse is the person that we all think of when we think of nursing. They work on the wards taking care of patients with a wide range of different medical conditions.

If you’ve got a nursing degree, you can start looking at positions as an adult nurse and there are plenty available, but if you want a different challenge, you could look into becoming a children’s nurse.

It’s the same job but, as expected, you’ll be working on a children’s ward and dealing specifically with children and helping them through their recovery.

A lot of people find that this is a more rewarding career than working with adult patients, but it is also a lot more demanding and it requires a different set of skills.

Dealing with kids can be hard at the best of times but when they’re sick, it’s even more difficult.

As well as dealing with their care needs, you’ll need to help keep the children entertained and alleviate any worries that they might have because being in the hospital is a very scary situation for children.

People also find that the emotional burden is a lot higher because if you’re dealing with older patients that don’t make it, it’s still difficult but it is more expected, but trying to handle the emotional fallout of losing a child is a lot harder.

Family Nurse Practitioner

The majority of nurses deal with the daily care of patients but they don’t have anything to do with diagnosing them or deciding on a strategy for treatment.

But if you feel like you would be more interested in running tests and diagnosing patients, you could look into a career as a family nurse practitioner.

If you don’t like the idea of a traditional hospital ward setting but you still want to pursue a career in nursing, you should do a search for where do family nurse practitioners work and what do they do.

In basic terms, a family nurse practitioner falls somewhere between a nurse and a doctor. They can still carry out a lot of the duties that a doctor does but the training is different.

You’ll need a nursing degree and a little bit of experience first and then you can take further qualifications to specialize as a family nurse practitioner.

This is a better option for people that don’t like the shift patterns of nursing and want to work more regular hours because you’ll usually be working the same hours as a general practitioner does.

It’s a great job for people that like to be a part of the local community and get to know patients over a longer period as well.

Community Care

It’s not just people that are in the hospital that are in need of care. The population is steadily getting older and there are a lot of people that have health conditions and specific care needs, but they don’t need to be admitted to a hospital, that’s where community care comes in.

A lot of people, especially the elderly, need nurses to come in and administer care in the home and help them out with any daily tasks that they might be struggling with.

It’s a good career for people that like to get out and about rather than being stuck in the same place all day long. It also gives you more opportunity to get to know patients because you’re having more focused one on one time with them when you visit them in their homes.

Community care is such an important role because it allows people to keep their independence. Instead of having to stay in the hospital, they can remain in their own home and get the care that they need from community nurses.

Healthcare is changing and there is a bigger focus on preventative care and in-home care rather than getting people into the hospital. That means there are a lot of opportunities available for people that want to work in community care.

In terms of training, there are care positions available for people that don’t have a nursing degree but those are only for patients that don’t need medical assistance and just need somebody to help them out with tasks around the house.

However, if you want to improve your job prospects and work with patients that need more expert medical care, you will need to get a nursing degree.

Nursing is a very diverse field and there are so many different career options out there, these are just a few of the most popular ones.