There’s a similarity between critical care nurses and the ambulatory nurses, it’s not treating the patients for the same problems or diseases all the time. However, in another sense, that meant by our EQSQ personality tests, they’re very different. For the clinic nurses are dealing with walk-in patients, those who might have anything from a slight scrape to a need for referral to an emergency room. You, as a critical care nurse, will almost certainly be working with those with already in an intensive care ward: indeed, most of your patients will never actually be fully conscious while you’re there. They might have heart or lung failure for example, or be coming out of surgery (although there are other specialties that deal with this as well).

As such, the pleasant bedside manner and ability to deal with different personalities (from the more empathic end of the results from our personality tests) are rather less important. It’s also true that monitoring the patients, attending to the details of the treatment of these severely ill people calls more upon the systemizing side of your personality.

The joy of both types of nursing is in the variability, the changes that each day brings. It’s not the procession of the same patients with the same problems each and every day, rather, a series of different things, and as we know, variety is the spice of life, is it not?