Long Term Care Nurses
Long term care nurses are those who provide ongoing care to those with chronic physical or mental problems. As such it’s really a whole great big barrel full of specialties all in itself. You might specialize in treating those with learning difficulties, or autism, or schizophrenia: you might specialize in the diseases of children or adults, in specific diseases, or you might find yourself, if working in a small town or area, working with a mixture of all of them. You could also be working in hospitals (or even mental hospitals) or out in the community, tending to people in their own homes.
As you can see in this listing of the different types of nursing, there are many blurs between the different types. The important distinction here is that long term care nurses treat those with chronic diseases: as long as they are properly treated the illnesses are not going to kill the patients, but nor is the treatment going to cure them either. It might remove some of the symptoms, make them feel better, but that’s what chronic means, that it’s not going to go away.
As with all forms of nursing the training is via one of three different routes: a college degree in nursing, a two year college degree in nursing or a Diploma, all then followed by a licencing exam. Many of those who start with the latter two routes then go on, later, to take the full college degree as that’s how to get the promotions and the interesting (or more so) jobs.
As for our EQSQ personality tests, like almost all forms of nursing, you’ll want to be at the female brain end, the empathizing, to make a good go of this career.
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:37 am
I agree you’d have to have some high empathizing traits here, and a lot of patience. I know that long-term care nursing would be challenging for me, as I have an intense desire to fix things. I find this type of nursing more challenging than even palliative care. With palliative care, of course, there is no fix, and even I can see that. How frustrating, though, to work with a patient for years and years and know you can do nothing more than possibly make a disease ‘better.’ And know the patients can do no better than make their conditions “better.â€
For those with more patience and acceptance of human limitations, especially when battling what can, best, be maintained, I admire. It’s like living with a circle of fire round your house when all you can do, with perseverance and many buckets of water, is keep it off your siding and shingles.
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I hadn’t thought of the emotional intelligence requirements in that way but yes, what you say there makes great sense. Not only would you need empathy, you’d actually want to have a lack of the systemizing traits: that sort of emotional intelligence would lead to great frustration as there are no fixes, there are no systems to be analyzed and then repaired. Just the day to day grind of having to deal with whatever fate has thrown the patient’s way.
Then again, I can see that on very rare occasions great joy might be found. Treatments to all sorts of things are found at times, and wouldn’t being able to administer that breakthrough drug that actually cured a chronic disease be a thrill?
July 17th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
This will sound like an odd comparison, but to me it’s like teaching elementary school. I recall two particular moments that seemed to define the career to me (one the frustrations, the other the joy):
1. standing in front of a first-grade class with a cardboard clock, trying to teach them merely 12:00 and 12:30. Minutes passed, half-hour passed, nothing. Okay, it was the first time they looked at a clock. But I was happy to have been substitute teaching: I didn’t have the endurance to come back and see if another 45 minutes, and yet maybe another, would finally allow them to understand….
2. as the full-time teacher of Physical Education to elementary children, teaching first-graders how to dribble basketball. On day 3 or 4, one-by-one they started getting it. It was an incredible feeling: I was the one to teach them how to dribble a ball! Because of me, they would now go through life being able to do this.
But the joys were too far and few for me – as I imagine would be the case in this type of nursing. But I’m ever-so grateful to those wonderful souls who have the kind of patience required for each of these careers.
July 21st, 2007 at 9:02 pm
I have to admit that I don’t have the emotional intelligence (or emotional maturity to be honest) to try and teach anything to children of that age. Yes, yes, I know, future of the nation and all that, but if people can’t get it first time then I’m not interested.
That’s probably why the world, cumulatively, has had enough intelligence to keep me entirely away from the teaching profession altogether:-)
I have had one contact with one of my old teachers since I started writing (and getting published that is). He was my English teacher and I’d told a story about something he’d said when teaching me (essentially, that I was entirely lazy). A friend of his pointed this out and he was delighted to have been proven correct: I was indeed lazy (although I had also picked up some writing tricks from him) for, look, my piece in the newspaper was only 500 words long!