How do I Know if Nursing is Right for me?
If you are considering becoming a nurse, how do you know if nursing is the right profession for you? You can start by asking yourself a number of questions. Do you have the desire to help people who are sick or injured? Are you the type of person who rushes to the side of someone in need? Would you consider yourself a nurturing individual? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, nursing might be a good profession for you to enter.
Think back to your childhood. What happened when you were playing with your friends or family and someone got hurt? Were you the person looking for disinfectant and bandages? Did you ever want to take in a sick or injured animal? What if something happened to a pet? Did you watch your dog or cat have babies?
When you go to the doctor, does anything interest you? Have you ever been in the hospital, as a patient or a visitor? What did you think? How do you feel around sick people? Do you have to turn away when you see blood?
If you feel drawn to helping people, and not faint at the sight of injury or blood, nursing might be the right profession for you. It is a good profession for people who want to make a difference and help others. You need to be able to work with team members, but you also need to be willing to take on significant responsibilities, which in this case can actually mean life or death. Nursing is a profession suitable for both women and men, and the number of male nurses is on the rise.
Nursing is the largest of the healthcare occupations. There are some 2.9 million registered nurses (RNs) in the United States. They take care of people from the cradle to the grave. Most of them work in traditional locations like hospitals, but they can also work in very different places, like large factories that may need on-the-spot medical care. While it is widely perceived that nurses work under doctors, they actually work with doctors, or even on their own. When nurses are flexing their own professional muscles and doing the things they are trained to do, medical care is better. Some nurses can even specialize and actually be licensed to prescribe medicine and treat patients on their own.
Nursing is both a science and an art. It involves diagnosis and treatment, aid and education. If you want to help deliver healthcare to any group of people, you can find a place in the nursing profession.
Again, look back on your own life experience. If you are thinking about nursing, you have most likely seen a nurse. You have received healthcare yourself. You may have seen family members or friends getting care. If you visited anyone in a hospital, try and remember who actually came in to help the person you were visiting if they needed something. It would have been a nurse. The doctor usually sees a patient in the hospital once a day, but nurses are on duty all the time. A nurse would have changed bandages and brought medicine. If you were fortunate enough to visit someone in a well-staffed hospital, you might have seen nursing at its best. If you visited an understaffed hospital, your friend or family member might have had to wait for a nurse to answer the call button. That is because there are more jobs for nurses than there are nurses.
That means that if nursing is right for you, you will be able to find a job after you complete your training at one of the nursing colleges. The demand for healthcare workers in general, and nurses specifically, is projected to continue to grow. This means that getting a nursing degree is a pretty good guarantee of a job.
Published: 2009-09-21
