You know I wish that there was a video like this when I was considering nursing
school because there's so many things that
we think we know about nursing and what it's going to be like and then we
actually get into it and we're like god why didn't someone
tell me about this? So I'm going to share with you in this
video some of the things that you should know and need to know before you choose
nursing as your profession.
Welcome back my name is Tammy and this is NurseMinder and on this channel we
do everything nursing so if you're new here
consider subscribing below so that you get the next video when it's released.
All right so let's just start at the very beginning getting into school.
Now applying for a nursing position in as a student in the school has become
extremely competitive but if you don't do well in school
planning ahead of time you'll need to go back to school to get the marks you need
to be competitive to get entry into the university of your
choice. Now if you're anything like me I didn't go back to school until I was
an older student right so I had already had my son
I was married and I think I was 30 when I started nursing school and so
in order to start nursing school i actually had to go back and take
physics and chemistry because I didn't do them in high school so
you may not even be so much a case of having the highest marks but you need to
also have the right courses so planning ahead of time is important
and if you don't know you're going to be a nurse when you're 18
no worries you can go back later in life like I did.
however you will find that to enter into this profession
you need to have a really great marks we're talking in excess of an average in
the 90s maybe even higher so that's the first
thing you need to know. Nursing school has changed from when I
went into it and you're going to want to have a great
study plan prior to getting into nursing. Now that
leads us to number two nursing school is hard and there's a reason why your marks
need to be high and that's because we're looking for
students who have a proven strategy to do well in school academics because you
are going to have test after quiz after paper after
presentation rinse and repeat that cycle on a weekly
basis for two to four years depending on which
route you take. You will have five to seven classes each
of them with multiple chapters of reading every night, assignments,
preparation for labs, and clinicals and so it is a grueling
schedule and you will not get by just by listening to
the classroom at presentations you'll need to do a little bit of work,
but here's the bonus in that when when a group of people go
through something really challenging and this is something I learned in the
military while at the same time going through
nursing school, is when you are in a difficult situation
people bind together and what does that mean some of the closest
bestest friends you will ever make you will find in nursing school
because when you survive that you can survive anything.
Now social media makes it look like school is glamorous and
fun and it can be absolutely but it is a lot of work and you need to
be prepared for a schedule. When I asked my students for advice they
would give themselves if they could go back to the beginning of their year
one of them said #prepare to have no social life.
Legit, but put your comments below maybe you've already started nursing school
I'd love to hear if that's kind of what the reality was for you were you shocked
when you went to school and you found out that oh my gosh
I legit don't have a social life anymore or did you find that you're able to
balance school with work and hanging out with your friends and
still do really well? Let me know below. Okay so the next thing people often say
when they go into nursing school is they want to help people
and you absolutely need to want to have that as a deep down
core driving desire because you're going to be helping people
when they are rude when they are mean when they are vomiting
when they are not in their right of mind when they are under the influence of
drugs and disease processes when they will not
thank you for the service that you provide. You
will still need to have that deep core value that you want to help
people. Now the bonus to that is I actually feel it's quite an honor to
travel along with these patients in their most needed moment to help
guide them educate them walk with them nurture
their emotional distress so if helping people truly is
what you want to do in their darkest dirtiest times
nursing is probably a great fit for you. Now with that you'll have to remember
that you will be working with patients bodily fluids and so every nurse has got
their thing and for me it's mucus thick mucus
you know you have to suction and get in there really deep but you will also have
to find a way to get through that so maybe a strategy could be wear a mask
when you go in to do it which you probably are anyways put a
little peppermint oil in there before you go in because let me tell you
once you smell certain diseases you will know them forever- pseudomonas
is here in my mind you smell it once you know it and so
sometimes those smells are hard to get rid of you're going to be dealing with
poop nobody loves the emergency cleanup in poop aisle
nobody loves cleaning up poop at the best of time never mind
at shift change when the bed is completely saturated
but you also have to be able to go in there with a very respectful
attitude and you don't want them to see the faces you're making because of the
smell and it's going to smell yes a lot
but when you find a way to make your patient feel at ease and you make this
like it's okay it's normal we do this all the time we understand
we're gonna get you cleaned up and then you can go and have your moment later
somewhere else but in the moment with the patient when
you're with all those smells with all those bodily fluids
remember you're here to help people and you'll need to find some strategies and
tools to do that. One of the bonuses of going into nursing
so for those who are there to help people is your communication skills are
going to be like on the fast track and you're going to boost those and
you're going to be able to interact in multiple different situations with
multiple different priorities and com competing priorities
and differences of opinion and you will just shift in and out so quickly it
won't even faze you after a while. What does that look like? That means
you're going to be in one patient's room who is yelling at you because their
kleenex box is on the floor and you're going to have to deal with
that and reassure them go to the next patient's room who's complaining that
their water hasn't come for two hours after you've been to a room
where a patient has been coding and so you will be able to switch
rapid fire your approach to ensure that you have a very therapeutic
nurse patient relationship that is definitely one of the gifts of nursing.
But with that skill set comes a downside just like a plumber's house is the last
to be plumbed when you go into okay that's maybe not
true but probably half true if you're married to
a tradesperson comment below. When
in nursing you give everything you have to your patients and when you walk out
of that room sometimes you are depleted and you have
nothing left for your colleagues and this is a real
a real thing that people need to know about when they go into nursing is that
sometimes those thoughts about nurses eating their
young it happens but it doesn't have to be
that way we need to just continue to be present
for each other just like we are with our patients and sometimes that
is a challenge so just know that if you have a colleague who is short
with you it may not be you at all it just might be that the person's room
that they've just come out of has taken every ounce of empathy
and challenged even the most patient kindest nurse that there is
and that they just have to get rid of this ugly before they can be present for
you. I find often what happens is especially
when you're new and you're student nurses you go on to floor and you think
wow they shouldn't be a nurse we really have to stop and just think
about what is it that they've just come out
of? What burden are they carrying? Because we do that we take our patients burdens
on and we feel bad because we can't meet their needs we can't get them what they
want in a timely manner for a variety of reasons and that wears
on our soul and when you've gone into room after
room after room and maybe you can't advocate for them in
the way that you want maybe they're being discharged too early perhaps
they're they're refusing a medication because
they're confused and you don't know how to deal with that
it becomes a it externalizes at some point and sometimes it becomes in our
collegial relationships where we have these moments of breakdown
in civility and those are the times we need to rally around each other the most
and just find out what's going on so sometimes it's going to feel a bit like
a bully culture and in reality there is still bully
cultures out there but most of the times my experience has been that it is more
just an experiential and in the moment situation that really
just needs a kind ear. That is exactly how work is,
it is a joy, it is a privilege, it is an honor and I hope that's what gets you
through those rough patches. All right so another thing we need to
talk about is schedule. Yes we all hear it's nights evening weekends and we
think yeah no big deal I do that anyways but when you get into nursing and you
actually find out your schedule and maybe you're working
shift work if you're working traditional hospital nursing you're going to find
out that seniority rules the day so what that means is you
as a new nurse coming in your vacation is going to be probably in
November when nobody wants to go on vacation
and you'll only get one week at a time if that,
you'll be working every other weekend usually and if you have kids or family
events you will be missing out on some of those things.
That may not sound like a big deal right now when you're just starting school but
it does become a factor as you get older and you start
to have a family and a husband or a wife and children
and you want to take classes even you will find that shift work can be quite
challenging to do the things you want to do but is
there a bonus in that absolutely if you're working evenings
nights and weekends there's typically premium pace you make a little bit more
money we all love money. The other bonus is if
you find a unit where there's high turnover
and it happens to be something you enjoy for example when I was starting out
the trauma unit had high turnover because the work was
physically demanding and so nurses after two years had seniority and they were
able to select the premium vacation times and choose a
little bit more in terms of their schedule and their lines because
seniority rules the day in nursing. Now here's a
real bonus of nursing in general is that you have a
ton of opportunities. You can do clinic nursing, home nursing,
you can teach, you can be at the bedside, and
beyond okay you can become your own boss in nursing as well
but to get to those options you have to go through the same rigorous training
that every single nurse does, you have to
write the same test which is all based on med surg nursing.
Now here's one of the best things about nursing is we are one of the most
trusted professions year after year it comes
back that nursing is the most trusted profession but i will
share with you it is a thankless job you will not be thanked daily from
your patients, you will not be thanked daily from your colleagues, or even your
superiors, but when the thanks do come when people do recognize and appreciate
you they mean so much so grab on to those moments where
people do take that time to express their gratitude and use that to
fuel you forward because it is a pretty thankless job. And going
into nursing will put you as well position you as the
go-to person for all of your family and friends
you will receive phone calls, you'll have neighbors drop in, you'll get snapchats
with pictures and people will be asking you
to diagnose their problem. One of the downsides of being in the healthcare
profession is they think you know everything but
truthfully we don't. We become very specialized as soon as we leave our
schooling and we go into our first job we become quite specialized and a lot of
our knowledge is kind of on the back burner
and it can be quite intimidating when they come up to you and say hey what's
this rash? So I always just tell them to connect
with their healthcare provider maybe give them a few pointers or tips
along the way but in general I don't want to be responsible for
anybody's health demise so send them to their health care team.
So now let's talk pay again social media makes it look like nurses are
banking the money dolla dolla bill y'all however
it's not really going to be that way you're not going to be living
in multi-million dollar homes and driving very expensive cars on a nurse's
wage you can make some extra money working
evenings and weekends and taking on additional responsibilities
getting extra education you can boost your pay a little bit but your pay is
really going to be reflective of where you live and what the economy is. So I'm
in Canada and even across Canada you can find a nurse's wage vary by ten
dollars an hour just because of what the cost of living
is so you need to factor in those pieces about what you're reasonably going to
make as a nurse when you get started. Okay so in addition to making a little
bit of extra money as a nurse and having a decent living wage
you're going to have to pay every year to have that privilege.
So every year I have to fill out documents that
validate my learning and my experience and I keep track of all of my hours to
prove that I'm meeting the minimum obligation and that's because we are a
regulated profession and that means I have to pay money every
year to continue to work as a licensed nurse.
So plan that in your budget when you're
dreaming of all these riches you're going to get as a nurse is that you will
have to pay and one of the biggest things I don't
think people realize when they come into nursing is that it's going to impact how
you see the world forever.
You know i'll just give you a few examples my background is emerge and
ICU nursing and so I see some pretty terrible
things sometimes and I would come home on the regular and just look at my
husband and hug him and just look at my son and hug him because I was so
thankful that they were alive and they were healthy
and then it just changes how you see everything. You see risk
in everyday activities where you wouldn't see it before you see joy in
moments that you wouldn't notice before and so there are both sides of that
but when you're working bedside nursing in particular if you're working with a
challenged population or you're seeing death on a regular basis
it changes how you see and interact with the world and that's something that you
need to know if you're going to choose nursing as your profession.
and the last thing is you will have ethical and moral dilemmas like you have
probably never experienced before. You will have to
discharge a patient who is to who's not ready for discharge because
another patient who is more acute needs the bed.
You will feel like you're you're able to provide
care for a patient but the patient will not receive it he refuses or she refuses
based on other grounds and you'll have ethical issues about your own values and
beliefs and their values and beliefs and it will cause you to wonder and question
what we're doing in medicine at times. Those are great moments of growth that's
the bonus there is that you will learn to expand what is
normal for other people what is acceptable for other people what
alternatives exist out there and how can you advocate within
their needs within the scope of what you have available to you.
Now if you think this has been helpful and you're ready to jump into nursing I
will share that I probably would not go back and change
anything. I got into nursing because I was kind of at a transition I was at a
road crossroad. I had just married just had a child just
moved to another province and I wasn't sure
how I was going to provide for my family and having a conversation with a friend
of mine and her she was just retelling some of the stories about
doing cpr and the emerge and I thought oh gosh
if she can do this I can do this, but there was so much I didn't know about
nursing and that's why I made this video today
but that all being said I wouldn't change it at all I would still
go into nursing I love it there is so much variety in it if you are bored with
one unit maybe you thought you were going to
love pediatrics you get in there you're like you know what kids aren't for me
I'm going to go to adults - you transition to adults then you think
maybe bedside nursing is not for me I'd rather do clinic or vice versa you
transition. There's always opportunity to continue
to change and to grow. I've gone from military nursing where I
did the gamut I was in pediatrics, emerge, maternity,
orthopedics, burns, thoracics, respiratory, everywhere and I ended up
in teaching at the end of the day. That's where my passion is and so
there will be a place for you in nursing. Maybe it's research and policy
you're gonna find it so if you're not happy with where you are
transition somewhere else and that is the gift of nursing there is so much to
learn so much growth and I hope you enjoy your
profession. So share your stories below let me know
the journey that you've had in nursing maybe
did you go into one place thinking it was going to be your forever home and
find out quickly it wasn't or did you go into a job that you
thought well this is the only job i have and
quickly learned that it became a passion? I would love to hear your stories
comment below and let's connect. Hey I know you're probably not ready to get
off your phone or go back to work just yet or maybe even turn the lights
off to go to sleep so why don't you spend a little bit more
time here watching another video :)