accordmaniac said:
Hey mtwedt, do you find nursing rewarding? I was somewhat interested in nursing but I volunteered in the pharmacy department at one of the local hospitals and the pharmacist's job seems important to the well being of the patients so i was interested (I was actually interested in it before but that was when I found out the amount of money they made). In what you do, do you have to see a lot of patients pass away? I may sound greedy asking this but how much do you make? I am the first in my family to ever go to college because we immigrated here from Vietnam so it's important to me to make enough money to support myself and later a family and be financially stable and maybe be able to give some money to my parents each month to help them out. Also I heard a little bit about nurse practitioners and I searched online and couldn't find much info. Do you have a clue to what they do? Sorry for asking you so many questions but it's so nice to have someone that works in field to get info from.
PSL, I looked into pharmacy technician last night after I posted and after looking at the average which is not too far from minimum wage, it turned me off. Also while I was in the pharmacy, the technicians seemed to have more work to do than the pharmacists and they get paid a lot more. Also they all were really stressed especially when it got busy and they had to fill all the meds for all the departments in the hospital.
Well, you certainly do have alot of questions and they are good ones. Nursing is tremendously rewarding for me for the simple reason that I cannot think of any other way to do for my fellow human beings. The goal fo Nursing is to restore the patient to maixumum level acheivable on the illness/wellness continuum. Nursing's primary mandate for practice is advocacy for the patient and family in the healthcare setting. At 25 years of practice, I make 37.30 an hour here in Portland, OR or about 67,000.00 per year. With premium shift pay, I can make 72.95 per hour. My hospital will pay that much because it is still cheaper than getting agency nurses per diem to cover staffing needs. These are dayshift rates. If I went back to nights, I would get 5.00 more per hour and with clinical ladder 3 (basically doing paperwork and projects that demonstrate your clinical excellence) I would get another 5.00 an hour. That would be about 88,500.00 per year. You can certainly make a decent living practicing nursing, but you will work hard for every penny. Your hard work, though, saves or improves the quality of people's lives. Nursing is not the warm fuzzy stuff that you see on TV ads from Jonhson and Johnson. Caring is a vital component of any of the healthcare professions, not just Nursing. You have to be smart, committed, fast on your feet and fast in your thinking. I practice in Cardiac Surgery, which, in Nursing, is a sub-specialty of Critical Care. There are specialites and sub-specialites in Nursing as in Medicine. The assessment, diagnosis, plan/interventions and evaluation process are essentially the same. You must work as part of a team or the outcomes will not be the best acheivable. I must be able to get on the same page as the Cardiac surgeon as well as the pulmonologist, intensivist, nephrologist, cardiologist, neurologist, clinical dietician, clinical pharmacist, speech, physical and occupational therapists, acute care managers and ethicists. The primary nurse is the coordinator of care and in critical care that can take alot of doing. The cardiac surgeon may not know that filling pressures are up because of changes the pulmonologist made in the ventilator settings that are causing increases in auto-peep and would not even think of this. Nursing fills this gap. The pulmonologist may not know that a platelet count of 20,000 is not related to the intra-aortic balloon as a cardiac surgeon would, but I do and would fill in that gap too. Neither of these physician specialites would have a clue as to how to manage a patient with acute renal failure by using contiuous veno-venous hemodialysis employed by a nephrologist, but I do and can run the machine that performs this. Nursing treats the entire patient in whatever setting the patient is in. People do die....they die whether you participate in patient care or not. Dying is a part of life. While one of the distinct benefits of my area of practice is that cardiac surgery is undertaken to improve quality of life, people die becasue we can't fix everything. The goal in this setting is to bring a quality of closure to the patient and family, ie.....comfort care. This, done well, can be as great a gift and have as great a value as anything else we do. I cannot save everybody.....the last chest I scrubbed to open emergently in the unit died....he simply bled out under my hands. Some of my patients become septic and/or develop multi-system organ failure and die. All you can do sometimes is level the playing field to optimize a potential for recovery and hang on. We have a mortality rate of 2-5%, and we take all comers, including patients that other centers turn down as too risky and we do them sucessfully. In my job, you are part of something much bigger than yourself and it is something that matters. Nursing is the essential bridge or fulcrum of healthcare. You can work in an office, clinic, hospital, school, university or private practice. There are opportunities everywhere in the country and in the world. There are never enough nurses. Nurse practitioners have completed an advanced degree program beyond the 4 year Bachelor's and practice independently under the auspices of a physician for the most part. They have prescription privleges, etc....You must acheive a BSN before moving on to a Nurse Practitioner, Nurse Anesthetist or Nurse Midwife. NP's can specialize in family, acute, adult, crictical care, pediatric, neonatal and probably others. Nursing programs can start with a 2 year Associate degree at the community college and advance to a BSN, MSN and DNsc at the university level. We are also short of master's and doctoral level nurses. In short, you can get in there and get started and then advance your education and degree as interest and opportunity allow. To be sucessful in Nursing, you must do it for the love of the job and the outcomes it can produce for the patients and families under your care. You can make a decent living in Nursing and always have an excellent job market, but it is not a field to go into to make money. It is a field to go into to make a positive difference in people's lives.
Pharmacy technicians make a great deal less than pharmacists becasue the education and training is a drop in the bucket to a pharmacist. Their responsibilites and liabilities are minimal compared to the pharmacist. You may have noticed that the pharmacist must sign off on everything the tech does. The techs assist in mixing IV meds, entering orders, picking up orders and delivering meds for the pharmacist. An excellent pharmacy tech is invaluable to a pharmacist and the units they work on. I can certainly tell the difference between a superb tech and a modestly efficient one. The superb ones do everything within their job role to facilitate and expedite their end of the patient's care, and to the receiving RN, that is invaluable. The same is also true for the pharmacist and just aobut everyone who participates in patient care. Just above minimum wage is not adequate compensation for someone who carries out this job in an exceptional manner.
Well...a long post that has nothing to do with detailing. Perhaps the other forum members will find value in this in understanding just what nursing is. If you have more questions, it would probably be better to PM me and I will give it my best shot. Best of luck to you...MTwedt
, but unfortunately sometimes mistakes get made in the pharmacy too and you just gotta hope we can catch the mistake before it gets to the patients. 
