Why Choose a Career as a Registered Nurse
Why would you want to become a nurse? Do you want to have a fulfilling career while helping people? Do you consider yourself a helper, a healer, a care-giver? If you are interested in anything that falls into the spectrum of healthcare delivery, as a registered nurse you can find a way to do what you are interested in doing.
Healthcare workers are very much in demand. Despite the troubled economy, the need for nurses is still growing. As the "baby boomers" age, there will be more and more nurses needed, with less numbers of graduates to take care of them. Nurses have been in short supply in the United States for decades. That is one reason that many hospital nursing positions are filled by nurses who come from other countries.
If you become a nurse, you can be sure you will have a job. Nurses earn good money, and the more specialized the type of nurse, the more a nurse will earn.
One answer to the question, "Why become a nurse?" is that "You will always have a job with a decent wage." That is not a bad reason to pick a career. What would be even better is to say that "You will always have a job that you love, which will pay you very good wages."
Registered nurses have an extremely wide range of areas in which they can work. Most often, they are hospital based. Registered nurses staff every ward of every hospital. As a nurse, you can work in pediatrics, taking care of sick children. You can work in a general medical or surgical ward, helping adult patients recovering from any one of many illnesses or surgical procedures. You can work in the Intensive Care Unit, where the patient is monitored in countless ways, and emergencies can arise at any moment. If you really like emergencies, you can work in an emergency room. You never know who is going to come in through the emergency room doors.
You can work in labor and delivery, which is the happiest place in a hospital, helping women give birth. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, you can help deliver end-of-life hospice care to people who are dying, and need your nursing skills in a different way. You can train to be a scrub nurse, and help in the operating room. You can even further your skills and get more training to become a nurse practitioner. A nurse practitioner diagnoses and treats patients much like a doctor does. They have a lot of freedom and actually the chance to practice medicine without going to medical school, which is not for everybody.
You can work in an office as a nurse practitioner. You can also work in any office with doctors who need a registered nurse. You can work in a school. There was a time when most schools had nurses on site. Now, usually only private schools hire nurses. A school nurse can do everything from bandaging a playground scrape to helping diabetics with their insulin shots.
Nurses can work any shift around the clock. Most people want to work during the day, but if you want a night time or graveyard (middle of the night) job, you can always find that option in nursing. There are some people who prefer to work then. Nursing is a job you can do almost anywhere and anytime. Nursing homes, outpatient clinics, even private homes need nurses. So do cruise ships and summer camps and sometimes movie sets.
But you do have to go to nursing college to become a registered nurse. You may even decide to take your training further and expand your options.
Published: 2009-09-02
