I’m a nurse practitioner with about 20 years combined RN/NP experience so I’ll have a go at this:
Pros:
-love the on the spot critical thinking. In most positions you are right in the thick of it and your skills and education matter on a daily basis
-most (not all) patients appreciate you for what you do. I have a drawer FULL of thank-you notes from patients and families. I’m not sure how many other careers are as rewarding?
-for the most part, great colleagues and teamwork
-flexible scheduling
-variability…if you don’t like Cardiac ICU, switch to ER! If you don’t like ER, switch to cardiac rehabilitation.
-I absolutely love and am fascinated with the human body and I have a passion for explaining it to my patients and teaching them all about how their “parts” work.
Cons:
-on the spot critical thinking ==> the stress can be crazy sometimes when it is 2 am and it’s just you and the critically ill post-bypass patient and the ventilator alarm, another RN and the RT trying to figure it all out while you are waiting for the in house MD to arrive or call back. You’d better have the personality to be ok with this type of stress
-some patients treat you like Xrap; don’t even remotely acknowledge what you truly do and will get mad when you don’t deliver medicine like they think they deserve it ("I want my Zpak because I KNOW I need an antibiotic!)
-flexible scheduling: those 12 hr shifts that are so appealing (“COOL…two days off a week!!!”) can break you and trash your body. I can recall many many many days where I didn’t stop to go to the bathroom and didn’t take more than 5 minutes to eat because my ICU patient had to go down for a CT scan…and I had to travel for 1-2 hours with them to monitor the EKG and the vent while they are in the tube. Also, 12 hrs of moving and lifting patients = >killer back strain even for the ones of us in crazy good shape. I am approaching 50 and I seriously don’t know how some of the older RNs keep doing 12 hr shifts in critical care and ER. It was killing me when I was in my 40s!
I am now a nurse practitioner and honestly on most days I sincerely love what I do. But it is stressful and when I was working in primary care I watched wistfully while the office staff whipped out the back door at 5 pm on the dot and I still had a mound of charts to review, order, prescribe, etc. But that’s the tradeoff…with more education comes more responsibility and comes more pay also. I don’t agree with the DNP movement…but that is an argument for another day.