future for nursing
Hi Peter, I am an american nurse but I think nursing has the same problems regardless to what country you are in. Every day is a challange. Nursing is full of decisions==should I call the doctor, is this patient responding well to treatment, are his vitals normal. Nursing changes frequently, based on new techniques and medical discoveries. In the US, some states have mandatory continuing education requirements and some do not. There are always new medications and procedures that nurses need to learn about. Let me go back 30 years in time for an example. Patients that had repeated bouts of chest pain, but no signs of having a heart attack were considered mentally ill, they wanted to be ill and repeatedly came to the hospital for something that could not be proven. After the Viet Nam war, multiple autopsies showed young men with substantial coronary artery blockage. So doctors started looking closer at patients with chest pain and they discovered coronary artery disease. Subsiquently there was a huge increase in open heart surgeries--the only treatment for those patients at that time. So there was a great need for nurses trained in care of post open heart patients in the icu, operating room nurses to assist with the surgery, more doctors able to perform the surgery, and perfusionists who could run the heart pumps in the or. The cardiac cath labs became very busy needing more doctors able to do caths and nurses qualified to care for post cath patients. Eventually they discovered angioplasty and then stents because many angioplasties closed, the stents keep them open. Post open heart patients developed a multitude of complications and numerous medications were invented to deal with those problems. The balloon pump was used for patients who could not come off the pump post operatively. Those are just some of the cardiac discoveries over the last 30 years. When you consider all the other specialties in medicine we have made tremendous leaps and bounds. Cardiac monitors, Intensive care units. Add to that neurology, gastrointestinal, renal, orthropedics and the discoveries and techniques in each of these fields. Any nurse in any form of nursing has to keep herself educated in her field if she wants to work in any hospital in the world. Hope this answers your question.

Maybe they should pay nurses more than they do some doctors...they certainly do work harder than doctors seem to do!

I personally think that a huge challenge for nurses would be management in the institution that they work for. The management usually is unethical, unresponsive, and good at cover-ups. If you are a nurse you have to be a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil type of person. I have seen more nurses save lives when a doctor doesn't have a clue about whats going on.

Be a whistleblower, have support groups for whistleblowers, and back each other up so that you have such a tight network system you don't blacklist yourself out of work.