"You have to love it to sustain the ups and downs of the daily work of
being a nurse," says Dianne Moore. She is the director of nursing education
for the American Nurses Association of California. In addition to being an
RN, she has a master's and a PhD in nursing science.
"Nursing is a profession with many opportunities other than acute care
bedside nursing, so consider the broader picture of nursing when making that
choice," Moore adds.
"Most of all, for those thinking of their career choice, do what I told
my sons: Choose what you love to do and you will never feel like you are working.
Love what you do and the work is always worthwhile, even on the worst of days."
RN Kathie Swindell agrees that nursing isn't easy.
"It's a very challenging career," she says. "It's also a career where you
have to be thinking really on your feet and prioritizing -- it's not prioritizing
once a day, it's prioritizing multiple times a day, so it's a very dynamic
work environment."
Working with the elderly brings additional challenges, says Swindell. The
elderly tend to have multiple care needs.
"They don't just come with one issue, so it's about putting that picture
of the whole person together and working collaboratively as a team, and ensuring
that every person on that team works to the full scope of practice to meet
the needs of that patient," says Swindell.
"So, always our work has to have that patient in the center. It's very
much around patient-centered care."
RN Dennis Sherrod has more than 30 years of nursing experience. He's currently
a professor of nursing at Winston-Salem State University.
Sherrod completed a study in the late 1990s about how young
people make decisions about careers and some of the misperceptions they have.
"One of the misperceptions that's out there for young people about nursing
is they don't realize the autonomy that's involved in nursing -- that when
you're on a unit, you make the decisions, you determine which patients get
cared for first, you establish priorities," says Sherrod.
"Many of them don't realize that nurse managers and researchers are actually
managing multimillion dollar budgets."
Something else that's not well known is the diversity of settings in which
nurses work. Sherrod says about 50 percent work in hospitals, but the rest
work in other places.
"They don't realize that nurses work on cruise ships, or that nurses work
with NASA," says Sherrod. "They don't understand that nurses are just such
an integrated part of the health-care system.... There's a lot of variety
in work settings. If you choose hospital [work] you can, but if you want to
do long-term care, if you want to do public health, if you want to do community
health, any of those settings -- there's a lot of different places."
Whatever the setting, nurses have one thing in common: The care they provide
makes a lasting and meaningful difference in their patients' lives.
"One of the great things about nursing care is that... you actually make
an impression on every single one of those patients' hearts," says Sherrod.
"I've had a number of nurses come back and tell me that they've either been
at the mall or at the grocery store, and a patient will walk up to them and
call them by their first name and tell them how much they appreciate what
they did for them or a family member or a loved one when they were providing
care."