Nursing: A Career That Built On Caring
Nurses work on the frontline of healthcare. They aren’t in the background or behind the scenes. They are working face to face with patients in this highly hands-on profession. Nurses assess patients who come into a clinic or hospital. They take their vitals, medical records, and health histories.
Nurses are an integral and irreplaceable part of any healthcare ecosystem. Their work requires intelligence, advanced training from one of the many graduate nursing schools out there, compassion and attentive care, and they are needed now more than ever!
What Does A Registered Nurse Do?
Registered nurses provide care to patients in clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities. They work as part of a healthcare team with physicians, specialists, surgeons, technicians, assistants, and other healthcare professionals. Naturally, they are well-trained and possess the necessary PALS and ACLS certificates which allow them to provide support to their patients and treat them accordingly.
With their knowledge and expertise in the patient assessment, they can provide recommendations to the physician in charge. After the patient’s outcome or schedule is decided, it is up to the nurse to teach them on managing their condition. Nurses also provide emotional support to the patient and their families going through a difficult procedure or diagnosis where a nurse works to determine what they do daily.
Many Different Work Environments To Choose From:
Nurses and clinics tend to see non-life-threatening injuries and may provide preventative care. At the same time, nurses in hospitals care for patients admitted for severe conditions needing close observations.
Nurses can also work in places like camps, schools, prisons, Military bases, assisted living facilities, and even in patients’ homes. They are providing care to the people who need it.
They Specialize In Certain Area Of Medicine:
There are several job profiles for nurses that can be attained after achieving the required educational qualification. The job roles may also differ depending on the candidates’ industry and interest requirements and requirements.
Here are some of them:
- Pediatric nurses work with the youngest patients.
- Geriatric nurses work with the oldest.
- Emergency nurses conquer the havoc of the ER.
- Delivery nurses assist in pregnancy.
- Surgical nurses provide care in the operation theatre.
- Neonatal nurses provide care for newborn infants.
The field of nursing also gives you diverse career opportunities. Highly skilled nurse educators are in great demand. With an MSN, you will command a high paying educator position if that is your career goal.
Skilled in Communication & Interpersonal Skills
It’s the most important skill a nurse can possess in her career. Simple communication strategies are essential for nurses who almost always experience crowded schedules and busy hospital workflows. Their training helps them be good listeners and interact with patients, thus reducing physical and emotional distress.
Skilled in Patient Assessment & Medical Evaluation
Knowing how to assess a patient is essential. With the skills you have acquired from your training & nursing school classes, you can better understand the procedures. Assessment consist of two main components:
Collecting Patient Data:
It includes recording their vital signs, patients medical history, asking questions about their lifestyle, and performing a head to toe assessment.
Critical Thinking:
Based on the assessment, they’ll need to think about the underlying cause and build a report.
Skilled in Patient Diagnosis
A nursing diagnosis of a patient is different from a medical one. It revolves around the patient’s response to what is happening with them. These diagnoses are made based on standard guidelines that you will learn from your training classes.
Skilled In Outcome Identification and Planning
Nurses are trained to identify the outcome or goal based on the patient’s profile or illness. They can reach a point of conclusion about what the patient schedules must be and its implementation. They also educate the patients on following the treatment plan in order to achieve that outcome.
High Demand and Trusted Profession
Getting a graduate degree in nursing allows you to choose an area of interest in the field. A master’s degree in nursing will help you develop advanced clinical and leadership skills that help improve the nursing and health care field as a whole.
There is a much higher demand for skilled nurses and nurse practitioners with advanced nursing degrees.
A Career With Good Earning Potential
Advanced practice nurses make high salaries. The pay scale of a nurse may depend on the type of specialization and experience they’ve got. Demand for nurses is increasing in all countries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) states that nurses’ demand in the US will soar by 26% by 2020. The RN workforce is expected to have a steady growth from 2.71 to 3.24 million by 2022. If you’re looking for a nursing profession with which to make a difference over the coming decades, Go for it.
Health Care Management: Make A Difference In The Life Of Others
The profession of healthcare management is challenging, and the demand for healthcare managers is rising quickly. It requires a person in managerial positions at all levels of the organization. He or she should possess technical and interpersonal skills to carry out the necessary managerial functions of planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling, and decision making.
What do Healthcare Managers Do?
The healthcare managers are basically like a manager in any business. They manage an operation to be working as a pharmacy manager, manager of a clinic, a healthcare consultant, manager of a department, and you can also be an analyst working with the IT department.
Healthcare management or health care managers are not confined to just hospitals.
Suppose you are eyeing for a career in the health industry & have a knack for accounting, statistics, performance improvement, and quality management. In that case, healthcare management is an area that you get the best of both.
You can work in hospitals, have a business environment, and reward the people who come to the hospital for different medical reasons.
Skilled In Managerial Planning and Decision Making
Health care administrators negotiate escalating health care costs, changing trends in reimbursement for services in sectors like Advances in medicine, computerized diagnostics, treatment equipment, data processing technology, health insurance policies.
They rely on their knowledge of financial planning to allocate funds to all departments and resources equitably.
Able To Provide Plans That Improves The Efficiency Of The Hospital
Health care managers can harness the powers of business management to improve productivity in the healthcare industry. After all, today’s healthcare industry demands leaders who can innovate and lead in a time of change and shrinking budgets.
Departmental Resource Planning & Goal Creation
For each department, health care managers need to set clear goals & measurements and brief what the desired outcome will be. Goals should be lined with departmental and employee responsibilities. They should be well defined so it won’t be an additional burden on what the employee can contribute. Health care managers should determine what they are responsible for and how they have performed in the past.
Skilled in Employee Hiring and Onboarding
In order to fill in the required medical positions, proper management of human resources is essential. From a strategic perspective, human resource management plays a vital role in healthcare organizations that compete for labor.
All high-performing healthcare organizations must be dependent upon individual employee’s performance.
Beyond candidate recruitment, managers are also concerned about training and retaining those staff who are excellent performers.
Skilled in Supervision of Staffs
Health care managers must adequately plan, organize, direct, and control employee activities and also establish good lines of communication with all employees. They work toward helping doctors and nurses learn to appreciate and overcome cultural diversity issues, such as language barriers.
Skilled in Monitoring Budgets:
It’s one of the many responsibilities of healthcare managers’ to establish a proper accounting system for departmental funds, hospital equipment & research studies. Budget planning will involve deciding upon strategic goals, reviewing options, and deciding upon the best outcome.
Skilled in Managing Billing Tasks:
Healthcare management practice can be taken to be more proactive in your medical billing procedures. This involves managing patient registration details, reviewing financial responsibilities & generating patient statements. A follow up on patient payments, Unpaid medical bills, and handling collections is also the responsibility of healthcare managers.
The Demand For Healthcare Managers
Based on the report from BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics), nursing employment is projected to grow 20% from 2016 to 2026, much faster than all occupations’ average. Entry-level salaries for healthcare management can vary significantly based on different factors, including where you live, your years of experience, educational level, and where you work. Suppose you graduate with an associate’s degree in healthcare management. In that case, you’ll be able to apply for entry-level associate or specialist positions with the possibility of moving to higher-level positions such as supervisor and manager throughout your career.
