Competition in Healthcare: Just a Nurse

Wonderful article!

Wow! Terrific! Just recently I saw a doctor blame a nurse for something that happened to a patient. This doctor had privileges at our hospital, but the uproar that he created because of the accusation had even our ICU physicians screaming "foul"! It was nice to see our doctors stand up for our nurse- who was not guilty, by the way!

Awesome article!A wonderful explanation why most nurses are and continue to be nurses...because we want TO!

Inspiring article!!! Nurses are the ones who give and call the shots!! If it were not for the nurse closely observing, assessing the patient for acute changes or therapeutic reactions the MD would not know how to handle the case!! There does need to be improved communications between nurses and MDs. Having Grand Rounds would help this, but time is the constraint. Nursing is the primary step of the medical ladder, I wanted to be where the basics made a difference and nursing is that first rung.

Wonderful article!! I'm so sorry that happened to you in the ICU. That was really rotten of him. Fortunately it's not universal. I was actually thinking the other day, I've seen a fair amount of up-managing by our residents lately. I've had them tell scared families "You have the absolute best nurses here," "The nurses watch the patients very carefully," "the nurses are right on top of all of this."For me too, nursing wasn't the fallback plan when I failed to get into med school. My initial goal when I began college was to further my training in classical music (I play piano, flute, and I'm a singer), and to eventually get my PhD in music history and teach. In less than two years, I lost my joy in it. But I had been working as a CNA during my breaks, and I LOVED it!! So I decided to become an RN. Treating injury and illness is part of what we do, but primarily I wanted to treat people. I wanted to be the one with the patient, caring for them and helping them and their family through their process.

Really nice article!

"Physicians are tuned into the disease process while nurses tune into the patient’s experience of the disease. "And this is why I think NP's are the best of both worlds. Once I saw an NP, I never went back to a dr. Nurses want to improve the lives and health of people, not just treat problems. I'm glad we have doctors, because of course we need them for in-depth illnesses, but I love nursing and would not want to be anything else than a nurse.

Decades ago family members criticized me for my decision to pursue nursing instead of medicine, but they did not propose any useful advice to remedy my difficulty in dealing with chemistry and math even in high school, to make myself competitive for medical school admission. They also didn't say how I was supposed to pay for medical school when I won scholarships for nursing school. I might have flourished in the medical profession, but I needed to get into medical school first, and I was able to figure that out on my own in the tenth grade.