Take Care

Typically, a doctor only spends about a fraction of their time with a patient. It is solely a nurse who assesses and provides for all admitted patients. In an ordinary hospital setting, a person would find the nurse responsible for: filling out reports and charts, making rounds looking at labs before administering medication, overseeing patients’ activities and meals, communicating amongst doctor’s and patients, and providing support for patients’ families. In addition, recovery is the longest period of stay in a hospital. It is the nurse’s responsibility for ensuring the patient’s feel comfortable, safe and well taken care of. A registered nurtures their patients along the way to full recovery. An individual in this profession would experience a gratifying moment. Nurses can be considered as the backbone of a hospital, because majority of support comes from them. The career of a nurse is filled with responsibilities and benefits.
Job Description
A nurse’s career comes with many responsibilities as stated above. A nurse would regularly assess patient health problems and needs, develop and implement nursing care plans, and maintain medical records (Par 1). Nurses would not only do this for one patient, but for many different patients on the same floor on the same night (Reperajo). More responsibilities would be to give care to ill, injured, convalescent, or disabled patients (Par 1). Giving stipulations to a patient after discharge to furthermore help the process to a full recovery is another duty (Par 1). A patient might appreciate the thought that the nurse would help him or her past the hospital administration episode of their recovery. Nurses are filled with many duties every day they step into a hospital.
Working Conditions
A typical nurse would work inside a hospital. There are many different areas of a hospital that a nurse could be stationed at. Different areas would include intensive care unit, operational room, emergency room, and the medical-surgical unit floors. They could also be working in a clinic or a home health care. Most nurses work in a well-lighted and comfortable health care facility (Par 1). Most health care facilities are clean and sterile as needed to tend to the public’s need. There are many different hazards in a health care facility when on the job, since nurses are constantly in contact with patients. Patients could be carrying many different infectious diseases and environment full of toxic, harmful, or potentially hazardous compounds, solutions, and medications (Par 2). An area where a nurse has to be aware at all times is a clinic where patients go to test or get treated for infectious diseases as well as any other hospital. There are many strict regulations to protect nurses from disease and other dangers, such as those exposed by radiation, accidental needle sticks, chemicals used to sterilize instruments, and anesthetics (Par 2). All these dangerous hazards can harm the nurse if they were not careful handling the equipment and not aware of their surroundings. Back problems can also occur from moving patients from bed to bed (Par 2). Nurses would not regularly move a patient by themselves; it usually takes two people to move a patient successfully, without harming him or her. Long term emotional stress is one of the biggest hazards that a nurse can experience throughout their career, as a result of forming bonds with patients and their families (Cornejo). Nurses also face everyday critical decisions, and ethical dilemmas and concerns (Par 2). Many decisions that a nurse would make will either help the patient recovery sooner or create more suffering for the patient. Even if the ambiance of the health care facility is uplifting, there are still hazards and stress factors that a nurse deals with.
Personal Characteristics, Abilities, and Skills
Good and successful nurses share an abundant amount of different characteristics, abilities and skills. Generally, a nurse tends to be caring, sympathetic, responsible, and detail oriented (Par 23). Without those basic characteristics a patient could find a nurse to be cold-hearted or uncaring. A nurse should be an active listener; pay attention fully when a person is speaking, spend the time to understand their patient, ask questions when needed, and continue listening without interrupting the speaker (Par 3). Nurses can get very confused or disoriented when not listening to the doctors’ directions or the family. A nurse must have reading comprehension with work related text and medical language (Par 5). Nurses have to be able to read the notes and prescription of the patients that they might have. Misreading any material can cause the patient discomfort. Being able to communicate effectively to others on a daily basis through speaking is a skill required (Par 3). Everyday a nurse has to communicate with the patient on the status of their well being, because the nurse has to assess what might be needed for him or her to recover sooner. Critical thinking is a skill that can give the most stress to a nurse (Abaya). Critical thinking can be described as being able to be logical and reasonable to find strong points and weak points to different solutions, conclusions and approaches to problems (Par 5). Nurses must use critical thinking when a patient may experience respiratory or cardiac changes and the need to make life threatening decisions must happen in a seconds notice. Monitoring is when a nurse looks for improvements within themselves, other individuals or organizations (Par 3). Nurses look to grow in their careers to become more successful and for their health facility to prosper at all times. Social perceptiveness is when the nurse understands the reactions of others and why they react that way (Par 5). Social perceptiveness helps the nurse to help the patient’s family and the patient to cope with the situation in a brighter way. Service Orientation is a basic of nursing. A nurse will actively look for people who need help (Par 5). Assisting people in need is what a nurse is best at. Active Learning is a must in a nurses list of skills. As new information comes in everyday, the nurse is able to use new and current information for making decisions and solve problems for the future (Par 5). Nurses face new problems everyday, whether or not a nurse can actively learn determines the successfulness of their career. A simple skill would be coordination; being able to adjust to others (Par 5). Every patient is different and a nurse must be able to adjust to their different needs. A nurse has the ability of problem sensitivity; ability to tell when something might or will go wrong (Par 3). This could help prevent a terrible accident that is not wanted. A nurse is highly skilled when it comes to the ability of deductive and inductive reasoning (Reperajo). Deductive reasoning is the ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense (Par 5). Inductive reasoning is taking unrelated items of information and combining them into a general rule or conclusion (Par 3). These two types of reasoning are used to solve a problem that nurses face to help patients with a speedy recovery. Nurses attain many different skills and abilities for their careers to be successful and to provide a quality service to the public and others.
Education
Nursing school is available at colleges and universities. It takes up to four years for a student to receive a bachelor’s of science degree in nursing for a registered nurse (Par 14). This is quite commonly referred to as a BSN. All nursing programs require taking a different array of classes such as: anatomy, physiology, microbiology, chemistry, nutrition, psychology and other behavioral sciences, and nursing (Par 16). Most of these classes are all pre-requisites before being accepted into a nursing program. Also, students of the nursing programs are required to have a clinical experience where the student gets supervised training in a health care facility (Par 15). Nurses do not only care for the ill, but also have knowledge in many different fields. For instance medicine is a major part of a nurse’s knowledge. People of this profession learn the techniques and information about how to diagnose and treat human injuries, diseases and deformities (Par 4). This is the big chunk of knowledge that a nursing student will need to learn in order to be successful. Knowledge of human behavior and performance is the field of psychology that a nurse learns (Par 2). Nurses have to understand how people would react under certain circumstances to help them cope with any situation. Nursing education is a difficult program because of the amount of information needed to be learned in a four year period.
Salary and Job Outlook
Nursing is one of the most on demand jobs on the market in medicine. It is harder to require a job due to the recession that the United States is in. The money that a nurse receives is one of the appealing aspects of the job. The median of 2008 of registered nurses salary is $57,208 (Par 2). The lowest hourly wage for a registered nurse is $20.20 (Par 2). The highest hourly wage for a registered nurse is $41.97 (Par 2). This amount of money can make a middle-class family very happy. Nursing might be one of the fasting growing jobs on the market today. A 23% increase is being projected from years 2006 to 2016 (Par 28). This is faster than most average jobs. With more people becoming nurses, patients are better taken care of and recover quicker. Employers are actually having a lack of RN’s to hire and younger RN’s to hire also (Par 36). This is good news to many young aspiring RN’s students. This is one job that the recession can not affect.

Conclusion
Nursing has become the number one in demand job in the healthcare field due to the needed RN’s and the salary. The profession is very appealing to young students due to the recession that the United States is in at the moment. The RN program is a very tough program to get through. A dense amount of information is learned in four years. After becoming a licensed registered nurse, many responsibilities come upon the nurse. With the responsibilities of people’s lives also come the hazards of infectious diseases and the hazards of the equipment and tools. Emotional distress might come along after a long period of time due to the difficult decision making and the possibility of seeing a patient lose their life. The great benefit comes though, when a suffering human being is able to walk out the hospital fully recovered and happy to be back to a healthy state of being. I chose the career of being a registered nurse so I can make a difference in a persons life and their families life, also to have the necessities to start my own family.