Nurses
We’ve looked at registered nurses as a single profession before and I think it’s worth having a look at the different specialties in some more detail. One of the commenters on that earlier post, Jessie, made the point that those different specialties seem to require different qualities, as measured by our EQSQ personality tests, than others. The emotional requirements of working on a terminal care ward (or in a hospice) are going to be vastly different from the more systemizing or technical skills needed in a post-operative care ward, just as an example. So we would expect the different types of nursing to attract those who have different results on our personality tests.
So the next few posts will be looking at the different types of nursing and trying to work through what might be the useful and appropriate skills and talents for each of them.
It shouldn’t be all that much or a surprise that not all forms of nursing require the same things. There are, after all, 2.4 million nurses, perhaps the largest of all of the job classifications (certainly the largest of the professional ones). It’s also true that the basic qualification is the same for everyone, becoming a registered nurse. Yes, there are further possible qualifications to get, but that’s the first and most important. In the training itself you’ll experience a number of different types of work, but there are so many that you’ll not get to try them all.
So an overview, a tiptoe through the alternatives, should be useful so that you can see th various options open to you. Some mean working with children, others exclusively with the old, some with the extremely ill and others require almost no contact with the patients at all.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:05 am
That seems like an anomaly: nurses that require almost no contact with patients. Do you mean no direct, one-on-one contact, or all contact? I suppose this happens in teaching and other academic settings. And there’s a growing segment of nurses who work on help hotlines, with contact via telephone. These nurses work with adolescents, drug/alcohol abusers, those suffering domestic violence, etc. This Nurse Week article, http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/04-06/abuse.asp, speaks of how nurses performing telephone intervention can help combat domestic abuse by teaching safe behaviors in those being abused (mostly women).
Are there other nurses, other than teachers and such, who have very little contact with patients?
June 21st, 2007 at 8:52 pm
We’ll find out which nurses don’t have contact with patients as we go through, won’t we? But yes, from the intelligence I’ve been able to gather so far there are a few. I know, it seems like a contradiction but there it is. Over and above the teaching well, it depends on quite what you mean by contact with patients.
For example intensive care nurses obviously have contact with patients but they’re not really conscious, most of the time at least. An operating theater nurse would have more intimate contact with patients than is considered polite in society but would again be most surprised if any of them ever talked back, or even awoke.
But leaving aside that sort of playful intelligence yes, there are a few: infection control, for example, is very rarely about actual patients.
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