How do I Get Started in Nursing with an ADN Degree?
You've taken a good look at the nursing field and decided a career as an ADN nurse, might be the right one for you. Your decision is probably based on your desire to help others by providing relief from pain and discomfort. But beyond knowing that you'll likely spend a good part of your career caring for patients, what will your daily responsibilities look like? Now that you've settled on nursing, how do you get started?
What Does an ADN Do?
ADNs may choose many different career paths, ranging from pediatrics, maternal, and newborn, to adult health, to psychiatric, community health, or gerontology. Nurses might also specialize in a variety of areas, including family practice, geriatrics, midwifery, cardiac care, emergency nursing, labor and delivery, or oncology.
Obviously, the nurse's duties will differ depending on the kind of patient the nurse is tending to, and what setting the nurse works in. For instance, the nurse might work in a hospital, a clinic, school, assisted living facility, in private homes, schools, and many others.
Regardless of patient type and setting, a nurse will have a daily round of duties that will likely include administering medication, consulting with other healthcare providers, changing dressings, monitoring patients, and managing medical records.
Nurses in clinics might get exam tables or equipment in position, turn on computers, and get charts ready. They may check height, weight, and other vital statistics, collect details of a patient's injury or illness, handle follow-up tests such as MRIs, X-rays, and set up meetings with specialists. They might also help patients with therapy or give out educational materials.
Specific Types of Nursing Care
A more intense type of nursing can be found in critical care, or intensive care, which involves treating patients who have life-threatening conditions and who require constant care. This might be a trauma nurse, neonatal intensive care unit nurse, or ICU nurse. Critical care nurses care for the dying, administering injections and IVs, while educating families about life support, or caring for those with brain injuries or paralysis.
They might treat patients who have had strokes, experienced severe trauma, or who have life-threatening illnesses. Critical care may occur outside a hospital, particularly in a home, where the nurse might be involved in inserting a feeding tube, ostomy care, catheter care, suctioning, wound care, respiratory treatments, and medication management.
Nurses involved in ambulatory care tend to patients outside of the hospital, in outpatient facilities, rehabilitation centers, home hospice, and same-day surgery centers. These nurses might work with dialysis patients, in telehealth, or palliative care.
In hospice care, for instance, the nurse makes sure proper medication is ordered, assesses whether the patient is safe and comfortable at home, manages equipment orders, and educates patients and families on medications and their side effects.
Duties in Depth
Hygiene: Nurses are often the individuals who bathe and change patients. They may also provide oral care, hair grooming, and cleaning up after incontinence.
Medications: Nurses must coordinate and prioritize the administration of medications several times a day.
Nursing Care Plan: Nurses often develop a care plan, which would include the nurse's assessments, nursing diagnosis, interventions, expected outcomes, and evaluations of outcomes.
Diagnostic Process: Nurses help collect data by completing assessments during each shift, adding this data to the patient chart. They may also record vital signs, do blood work, urinalysis, culture collection, and other procedures necessary to diagnose and monitor patient condition.
Other Duties
Interwoven with these duties are a nurse's need to practice good communications with patients and other healthcare practitioners, work as part of a team, and engage in problem solving and critical thinking. Nurses must also spend time learning and using ever-evolving technology, both for record keeping as well as in patient care. Nurses may also have to resolve conflicts, participate in research and information gathering, and be aware of and implement legal and institutional standards.
Training to be a Registered Nurse
Most nurses enter the work force by obtaining an associate's degree of nursing. The advantage of obtaining an ADN is that the student is able to complete a degree quicker and enter the work force sooner than those seeking a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. Regardless of which degree is obtained, the student must sit for and pass the NCLEX (National Council Licensure Examination) before becoming an RN.
Are you interested in becoming a nurse? If you want to earn an Associate of Applied Science in Nursing Degree, ECPI University can help. For more information, connect with a friendly admissions advisor today.
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