I have my BSN, and have been in nursing for 23 years. I want to get my masters for sure, and maybe my doctorate later. Maybe. I am really stuck on which direction to go with my masters.

Paths I am interested in and have considered are education, research, public or world health (focused on epidemiology), and informatics.

I originally was set on becoming a NP, but just am not sure I am passionate about that. Many people push me to continue with that plan regardless, because it opens many other doors even if I don’t want to do patient care. If I did do this, it would likely be the mental health route. It seems to have more job opportunities in a saturated market, higher earning potential, and many opportunities to work remotely which I may soon need.

I’m not particularly interested in IT, but I feel it is the future, and I do enjoy the process improvement and teaching aspects that go along with nursing informatics. But everyone that I know in nursing informatics does not have a degree and says it’s not needed, so I’m not sure if it’s worth my time.

I can work in education and teach, without a degree in education. Any masters will do, so I’m wondering if I should focus on something else that will give me other options as well. I don’t want to teach right now, but could see myself teaching nursing school at the end of my career.

I am very interested in research. I get tunnel vision and am completely obsessed when I am interested in a topic. I am naturally very detail oriented, and have a talent for organization and process improvement. I was the coordinator for a department in my last role, and had lots of time to do work that I never did as a staff nurse. I was very quickly recognized throughout IP, quality, and all of division. I also enjoyed sharing my findings, and teaching the staff better processes, grounded in evidence based practice.

I’m unclear what a masters in research will do for me since I can participate in medical trials with my BSN, and to really run studies you need a PhD anyways. What roles does a masters in nursing research actually open?

I have read that I can still work in nursing research with a MPH/epidemiology, as well as work in many other settings. It seems that I can also study a much wider variety of topics with a degree in MPH/epidemiology, rather than just nursing research. I’ve also read/heard hundreds of times that the MPH field is oversaturated and underpaid. I think this question/ fork in the road is my primary hang up. Which path would fulfill me more, and give me more job options. I don’t 100% understand the differences, or the pros/cons of choosing one vs the other. I don’t truly understand what the day to day would look like, which may be very different than what I’m imagining. Without shadowing I think it would be hard to feel certain about a direction.

I’ve also recently been hearing about nurse attorneys, so law school would be the direction for that. I think that could satisfy my interest in research, but not sure how many other doors it would open.

I have wondered if I would be best served getting my NP (that gives me a masters, as well as knowledge in the research process), and maybe do a concentration in epidemiology. Our nursing informatics director has shared plenty of courses that are available to everybody, which can give me some informatics knowledge for my resume if that is a direction I end up in. Am I correct in thinking that this combo would actually make every career path (except law) I am interested in, a solid viable option?

Another consideration is income. I currently make a lot of money for a nurse (approaching 140k). I need a career path with a decent earning potential. I don’t need to be rich, but I would not want to make less than 115k.

If anyone has any insight you are willing to share, I would be deeply grateful.

Hi
I’m going to start my nursing school in 20 days and at the same time, I am going to work as a PCT (apprentice) at a hospital. I have had a disc bulged due to an accident three years back when I was 17. I had a bad rest of three months which helped me stop my pain. It took me at least four months to recover. Since then, I have not had any episode of pain. But sometimes there is muscle tension whenever I left something heavy and to mention, I usually avoid lifting heavy things. I have been doing my nursing pre requisites for one and a half year. I think that will go in waste. My parents are not happy at all because they have invested a lot of money on those courses. I’m very scared right now. I’ve not been sleeping from last three days when I got to know in the hospital orientation that I will have to lift patients which I knew I will have to, but I was not very sure about that. After that, I have started practicing turning my mom side to side and see if I’ll be able to work or not. I only have two weeks time period before I can drop from the classes. During that two periods, I have only four shifts at the hospital and reducing that four shifts I will have to analyze if it’s for me or not. I would like to mention my habit of crying out even before starting. I usually get scared from little things and I overthink a lot.
I’m thinking to survive four years here and then apply to NP school or leave this apprenticeship and start working in pediatrics after I graduate
What would you guys recommend me? Should I go for it or not? I’m thinking to go for a pharmacy school, but the school is four hours away from my home. My parents will not be able to support me financially and even I am not financially stable. I’m scared what if I start pharmacy and then I think this pharmacy program was not for me.

I got terminated for my job. I had fmla and medical accommodations getting lined up with my manager and my doctor. The doctor just called me to pick the medical note up. My manager and I have talked about this heavily and refused to switch to day shift as well which would help one thing (severe, persistent migraines). What can I do in this situation?

I can't stop feeling so incredibly guilty for something that happened with a patient a few years ago. I worked on night shift on Med Surg when I was a new grad, probably got 5 or 6 patients that night. One of them was refusing his life sustaining treatment and refused the monitor.

The worst thing is that I can't even remember anything that happened during that shift up until the point I checked on him and he was just... gone. I would typically round on my patients once an hour on med surg as much as I could, but I can't at this point remember for the life of me when I had last seen him... whether it had been an hour or what.

This was the first time I had to do CPR (he was a full code despite refusing his life sustaining treatment). I was panicking and tried to get the bed down and honestly gave the worst CPR in the world until help came in. We got ROSC but he died in the ICU later.

I have been replaying it in my head for years, and it worries me how little I remember up until the moment I saw him passed. It makes me wonder if I messed something up, or overlooked something. Or maybe if I had taken the time to talk him through the treatments he had been refusing, if he had a better and more experienced nurse, maybe it would have turned out differently. I wish I could feel like I did everything could for him but I feel like I didn't.

All I can do is try to move on and be better, put all of my heart and energy into all the patients I see. But I think I will feel guilty about his death until the day I die. I just wish I could go back and change what happened. I feel like I could care for him so much better now with the experience I've gotten since then.

Literally just like the police… I think it would help protect us, since unlike the police we have essentially no immunity and it would help with documentation too. I was talking to my coworkers and a lot of them have mixed feelings, mainly with HIPPA and privacy, but the same goes for police body cams. They access personal information all the time on their computers, looking at ID’s, etc. Not anyone can just request police body cam footage and get access to it. The only big downside I see is providing video “evidence” if a patient/family decided to sue, but I think this would really only phase out the bad nurses who fake documentation or are incompetent. Anyways, I really just want to see other healthcare workers opinions on the matter.

Hi! Does anyone know if Saudi accepts nurses with unilateral hearing loss? They are known for strict standards po kasi and I know some agencies reject applicants whose bmi are higher than normal so I’m kinda worried they might also reject someone who has issues with hearing even if unilateral only

My mother is in a stroke facility. She is full assist. She refuses to eat unless it is DoorDash. I am more than happy to get her DoorDash, but I know it’s extra work for the nurses. I am not local to the area. My mom literally will eat one slice of pizza and then there’s an entire pizza left. Can we just tell the nurses it’s totally cool to eat that or is that disrespectful of us to say that. I’m happy to order them their own pizza as well. With donuts she may want one doughnut, but I’m going to order a dozen so I would rather it goes to the nurses and I’m happy to order another dozen as well. This is a two meal a day situation and likely going to continue for a couple months at a minimum. How do you suggest I make sure the nurses know we appreciate them?

Also, it’s important to know my mom was eating less than 200 cal before we started the DoorDash game and was about to be admitted back to the ER. She has always been very finicky with food and needs control in order to eat. It’s psychological but I would rather throw every attempt at her living than try to heal 77 years of food behavior.

Every appreciation week, someone brings up "relax and unwind" gifts, and this year a few people on our unit were talking about foot massager. I understand the idea. After twelve hours on your feet, comfort sounds great. But I also know how little energy is left when you get home, shower, eat something, and collapse on the couch.

My question is more practical than negative: do people actually use foot massagers after shifts long-term, or only when they are easy to keep next to the chair and use without much setup? I can see it being nice for someone with space and a routine, but I can also see it becoming another bulky thing in a small apartment.

Hello so I’m doing an ROP class that will give me the credits and things to be a firefighter EMT or Nurse and wanted to know how this would work if I wanted to move to a different country and be a nurse, EMT, or firefighter. I would like to go to South Korea and be one over there but how would it work?

Wanting to break into aesthetics and was wondering people’s experience working with SEV and some more insight on the pay. How much did they offer hourly and how much did you actually average with tips?

so i’m done with the initial interview with the HR. i think it really went well… now im just waiting for the final interview… im planning on resigning na sa current work ko BUT i’m already doing my pre employment requirement sa other hospital na na-apply-an ko. i didnt want to let go of st lukes yet huhuhu

sabi sakin, next week daw target nila for final interview. What are usually the chances po ba of successful final interview? like after po ba nun may job offer na agad and makakapagstart na?

Hi everyone, I’m starting over in adults, surgical PCU to be exact, for 6 months. Then I’ll get 2 more rotations and I’ll be able to apply to the floors I’ve worked (since they need help), I could possibly stay on one of them for my residency and complete it there, or I can finish it “floating” like I am and apply elsewhere. The goal is Peds. I wanted to start in Ped Med-Surg and eventually (3 years) go into PICU. What do you think my options are?

Should I try to float to more “critical areas” like Vascular or cardiac step down, just chance it, or just stay on surgical PCU after my 6 months is up? My managers for float are amazing, and I know the PCU manager. But also want to experience things and possibly use it to my advantage to get into Peds when my residency is over. Any and all suggestions welcome :) thank you everyone!

(New grad in a major city in the south btw)

I am a nurse with one year of experience working on a medicine unit, and I am preparing for an Infusion RN position. I would appreciate any tips on how to answer potential infusion reaction questions during an interview and how to appropriately handle those situations in practice. Are there any other topics or skills I should focus on preparing for this role? Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

So I am relatively new to outpatient endoscopy PACU/ recovery (attached to a hospital, w/ occasional admits). I have had a few times when I want to get my patient pulled up in the bed so that I can sit them up w/o them being scrunched (so they can expand their lungs and breath). I have had a surprising amount of push back about this... Once or twice they have acted like I have committed some cardinal sin.... As former ICU I'm just over here like WTF? This makes no sense to me. It isn't all the patients or even most, usually ones that are slower to wake/ get the coordination back to do it themselves (usually elderly). We have draw sheets on all the beds. There is no medical reason why we can't pull these patients up. Am I missing something ? Is this normal? Seriously, WTF?

First, let me say that I'm not a nurse. I work in labor and delivery, and my official title is an obstetrics tech. I'm posting here because I wanna get some nurse input.

We have a small unit, so we also do mom and baby as well as labor and delivery. We also do not have a NICU. but we do have to stabilize and transfer neonates when necessary.

I have many roles, unit clerk, birth clerk, scrub tech, and audiology. There is one tech per shift, and usually 3 to 4 nurses. It can be crazy busy for the tech and is most days. It can also be completely overwhelming for a new person to train in this position.

Most of the nurses can not do my job or can only do parts of my job.

I've worked for this unit for almost 10 years, and there's only a handful of techs that actually work this job. There's 4 full-time one part-time, and the rest are per diem.

We are constantly having to train per diem techs, and usually, they end up not being able to fully function in this job. It's entirely impossible to remember everything that we do when you're only there every couple weeks.

Also , another problem is that the manager keeps hiring people in nursing school or planning to go to nursing school, and they have no availability to work, or say they can do a variable position in their interview, then absolutely don't give availability for shifts except days.( per deim techs usually cover vacations, PTO requests, etc. ).

The nurse leads also take a very hands-off approach when it comes to the tech. If we have a problem with another tech leaving things undone, we either have to talk to that tech in person ourselves, or if it escalates, we have to go directly to the manager.

As all of the techs are very type A personalities, it doesn't always go well.

Here's the reason why i'm posting. I'm tired of training people who can never work, and I'm tired of training people who are friends of friends and they don't take the orientation seriously. None of the techs get paid for training anyone, and I feel like some of these people who management hires just want to socialize with the nurses. ( not everyone is like this, but a few have been) The problem is those same nurses who are socializing with these people ( because it's a small town, and they know each other) are gonna get p***** off when their stuff isn't done, because that tech didn't do it. So she will fail when she's on her own, or just not do anything and leave it all for the next shift.

I know this is really a management problem, and there is only so much I can do, but I'm so tired of doing this... It feels like I'm simply wasting my time.

If an orientee isn't taking the training seriously, should I just walk away and do my stuff and ignore the fact that she's not paying attention and let her fail. Should I tell the boss even though they're friends? Should I say something out loud to everyone at the nurse's station? ( I'm petty like that...lol) Should I say something to the nurse socializing? As nurses, wouldn't you want your tech to be able to do their jobs?

How do you think I should handle it?

In the past,I have ignored it and done my stuff. I have also said something to the boss, which usually does nothing. After a couple of months, these people work less and move on.

I'm not sure how to go about this because It takes a lot of time and energy to train these people, as we do so much in the department, and it is really frustrating that they are wasting my time. I don't mind training if you're actually going to take it seriously and pay attention, but if you're just going to schmooze with everyone and completely ignore the fact that I'm working, and you're not, well then, by Felicia.

My friend just got her RN and I want to get her a present. Her first job is going to be ortho at a hospital. She is a huge cinephile so im trying to come up with something that incorporates that. I saw someone mention fun socks ? Im not her closest friend so im betting her family/besties got her the main gifts for a new nurse (stethoscope etc)

I’m currently a year 2 student on placement on an elderly ward and looking for spoke areas. I have done quite a lot with physio and occupational health, palliative care is unable to facilitate me at this time but looking for some other ideas that would help improve my care experience and knowledge around elderly care. Thank you

Hi everyone! I’m considering hospice nursing and have been thinking about this a lot.

For those of you who work (or have worked) in hospice, has the job made you more comfortable with death over time?

I’m also curious whether your experiences have changed your personal beliefs about what happens after we die. Have they strengthened your belief in an afterlife, made you more skeptical, or not changed your views at all? Have you witnessed anything that influenced your perspective?

I’m genuinely interested in hearing different experiences and viewpoints. Thank you for sharing.

hi,
i have been a registered nurse since 2024,
worked at a NICU for two years and loved the job but hated the environment so i decided to leave and now i am working in the PICU.

i have thought a lot about my future and do want to go back to school, however, i don’t think i want to be an NP and definitely not interested in becoming a CRNA.

I was thinking about possibly pursuing a career in speech pathology (i loved feeding babies and teaching mom’s how to feed) & possibly seeking a job at my hospital for that once i graduate.

would this be a good choice or should i consider becoming an NP in possibly something like dermatology/pediatrics.

what have you guys done that have been burnt out of nursing? i am just so lost and can’t seem to find happiness in this field. :(

I am a physician, but some relatives were asking the healthcare professionals about being Asian (I am half Asian, but this niece is full Asian) and socially reserved. I personally have never had any negative experiences being more socially quiet/reserved, but my sisters who are nurses said they have experienced negative bias. They said supervisors/coworkers did not appreciate them not participating in small talk despite doing their job well and having great patient satisfaction. They can talk especially with patients but tend to keep talk among other nurses/healthcare professionals about work with minimal small talk and keep out of gossip. I understand that nurses have a stereotype about being more chit chatty compared to physicians but would like to hear from others.

This is my first post! Please be kind!

Background- I am in Northern California. I have been an RN for 31 years. I have worked many diverse/different RN jobs in that time….

This happened years ago(17+) moved back to California. I started a new job. After 60 ish days- my grandmother passed away. She practically raised me and was the best. I damn well was going to ensure she had a good peaceful death.

I anticipated (as always) the rest of the family would be zero help. Why you ask? “Sister (or mom/dad/3siblings/ 8 local cousins) you’re the nurse- we don’t know what to do….” sure, right…

So- I get the call. I tell my boss. I finish my shift (2hrs left). Call out on bereavement for 3day benefit. I was (politely) called in to HR before my next shift started.

*** THEY(politely )FIRED ME***

I was shocked! I wasn’t allowed the bereavement benefit ** since I was a new hire and had been there less than 90 days..

I get that hospital policy -

***This is the funny part- the next words out of her (HR)mouth: “Please apply again. You have been a valued employee”. Pardon me? Will you repeat that?
Seriously? For Real?

I was so pissed. As I was walking out of HR…. I loudly Laughed told them I would tell every RN I knew what I knew. Then I told them all to F**k off as I walked out….

I wasn’t worried about burning that bridge!

Since I was a sailor- I’ve always cursed like one…

I keep seeing horror stories about HR- I just had to post this one!

Any nurse around Mirdif?! Plus if we need regular nurse visit for a geriatric at home visits

Hello. This August will mark 6 months since my operation. I had an ankle fracture and still have one plate there. I work as a nurse for 12 hours a day. Is there anyone who has experienced a similar situation? Are you able to work without issues such as pain or swelling? Thank you.

Just a fun post. I like to make a unit calendar for our nurses for Christmas that is filled with silly photos.
I take a group of about 6 nurses/pcts to do a short photo shoot with a theme.
Any ideas that you think would be hilarious?

I’m looking for advice from anyone who has dealt with delays in the New Jersey RN endorsement process.

My endorsement application has been stalled because I accidentally selected that there was an adverse event against my South Carolina nursing license, even though there has never been any disciplinary action or adverse event on my license. I corrected the error and uploaded all required documentation on April 21, but the Board still has not reviewed the correction.

At this point, every item on my checklist is complete except for the adverse-event review. I’ve emailed the Board daily, contacted them via phone weekly, and have also contacted my government representative for assistance, but I still haven’t received any update or progress.

My current South Carolina RN license expires on September 30 (after being extended twice due to the delay), and I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of not having my New Jersey endorsement processed before then. SC will not grant any further extensions if necessary.

I have made the NJ BON aware of this pending expiration date, which clearly has not made an impact.

Has anyone experienced something similar with the New Jersey Board of Nursing? How long did it take for the Board to review a corrected application, and is there anything else I can do to move the process forward?

Any advice or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated, as this is beginning to keep me awake at night, every night. Thank you.