Hospital Nurses
It is impossible to imagine a hospital without nurses. It is the nurses who actually care for patients, whether they are following the orders of a doctor, or offering comfort and concern for the sick and injured. In some hospitals, LPNs do the actual, physical nursing work under the supervision of registered nurses. In other places, registered nurses may be supervising medical aides or assistants. In any case, the charge nurse is there to make sure the patients on her ward are taken care of.
That being said, there are enormous differences in the many places hospital nurses can work. What you might be interested in depends on your personality, strengths, and interests.
Some people, including nurses, love excitement, and those nurses tend to wind up in the emergency room. ER nurses have to be ready for anything and prepared to do almost anything. Especially in a large city and at a public hospital, nurses have to be prepared for all kinds of trauma, in addition to medical emergencies like heart attacks and strokes.
A completely different kind of excitement is palpable in labor and delivery, where nurses help women give birth. An obstetrical nurse knows how to deal with the rigors of this job, and how to help her patients have a happy outcome, which they do the overwhelming majority of the time. Advanced practice nurse-midwives can actually deliver babies, but the regular OB nurses could do it themselves if they have to, and sometimes they do. There can also be tragedy in the obstetrics ward, if a baby is born with congenital defects or dies before or during birth. OB nurses have to know how to deal with this too.
In big hospitals there will be a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, where newborns who need intensive care are taken. These will be babies born very early, or with congenital birth defects, or who suffered a traumatic birth. NICU nurses have to try and keep these little ones alive, when sometimes they can't even touch them except through the sleeves of an incubator. If they do their jobs well, and if the babies are not beyond help, the goal is to help them grow old and big enough to go home with their families. Some babies cannot be saved.
Pediatric nurses have to like kids. Oftentimes in a regular hospital, the pediatric ward is not that big, because there aren't that many children in the hospital. There may be children with cancer in a pediatric ward, and that takes a special kind of nurse to handle. If you are a nurse working in the pediatric ward in a community hospital, you might have patients with serious infections or even patients after surgery like appendectomies depending on the policies of your hospital. Some children born with congenital problems are in and out of the hospital. In all cases, hospital nurses who work with pediatric patients wind up taking care of both the children and their parents.
The intensive care unit or the coronary care unit, the ICU and CCU, may be one place at some hospitals and separate at others. Patients in intensive care are there because they are extremely sick and they need 24/7 monitoring and medication. Critical care nurses are smart and tough. Patients can need instant interventions. They may have to be resuscitated if they stop breathing or they have arrhythmias – abnormal heart rhythms. In a critical care setting, seconds and minutes matter. Sometimes, though, even in this setting, patients cannot be saved and families decide against heroic measures. Usually the patient will be in another part of the hospital, but if the time comes when the patient is in critical care, that is where family members will be saying goodbye.
There are many other places hospital nurses work. They work in general medical wards where patients are treated for pneumonia, or are recovering from more serious conditions. They can work on surgical wards, with post-operative patients. They can work on orthopedics wards, where patients go who have had severe fractures or other problems necessitating surgery. They can work with cancer patients on a cancer ward, or kidney patients who need dialysis, if it is done in the hospital where they work.
The bigger the city, the bigger the hospital, and the more diverse the hospital conditions will be. If you want to work as a hospital nurse, you will have a large choice of places to work. You might have to take whatever entry-level job you get at the beginning, but you can work toward the place you really want. You can even choose to have special training in one of these areas. Wherever you work, there will be challenges as well as opportunities.
Published: 2009-10-14
