Why Go Into Healthcare?
…and What is Positive about being a Doctor or being in Nursing?
Dr Steve Hetts of UCSF explains some real advantages:
“One really nice thing about being a doctor is there’s a tremendous range of things that you can do following medical school. You do a lot of training after medical school ranging from three years to be a general practice internist, to more training for very sub- specialized doctors. Often in surgical fields, you’re training for a decade after medical school.
Another thing that is positive nowadays is the fact there are so many more things that medicine can do for patients today.
Twenty-five years ago, if somebody was having a stroke, it was basically untreatable, and most people would do terribly. Now we’ve developed a field where we can use a catheter, get it up into the blood vessels in the brain, pull a blood clot out in a stroke situation, and restore that blood flow, and now a lot of those patients get partially or fully better. It is great when we have patients wake up on the procedure table and be just fine.
As you’ll hear from other experts, at this Job Forum health care event, it really does take a whole range of health care people and skills to be able to produce the medical devices and to analyze the imaging and to have a healthcare system that can ingest people into it in an emergency situation, get them efficiently treated, and then get them back out into the community and back to their lives.
What else that is truly positive about being a doctor is, that in your area, you are who the buck stops with. You are providing the definitive diagnosis based on the images or the lab results, or you’re producing the definitive treatment, or you’re coordinating the patient’s care, and so you are the essential person in that patient’s medical home. So one of the really nice things about being a doctor, is that you’re very central to either a very small sub-specialized part of somebody’s care, or you are responsible for a really broad portfolio of their care. You make a difference.
What about being in nursing?
Dr Steve Hetts describe :
Nursing is a wonderful profession as well. I, as a doctor, work with nurses of various different kinds every day. The classic picture of a nurse is somebody who goes to nursing school and then works in the hospital caring for patients directly on the hospital ward, at the bedside. They are the person who is touching the patient, administering the medications, making sure the patient is doing well, alerting other people when the patient is not doing well. They are the epitome of hands-on care. That is your classic sort of registered nurse position.
Nowadays often nurses become more sub specialized, and some of them do intensive care unit nursing, which is more complex. Instead of taking care of a few patients now, they are managing the patients. They may be messaging with the doctors and the other specialists in respiratory and other fields, about a patient who may have a breathing tube and is critically ill and has multiple organ systems failing or needs to be supported, and so it’s a much more complex set of care that he nurse needs to deliver. For this one has to become expert in pharmacology and managing intravenous medications to help the patient survive and recover.
There are also more office-based nurses who will see patients in clinics. There are nursing positions where they become more independent and they become the core medical care providers. Job titles such as nurse practitioner or certified registered nurse anesthetist are higher level nursing positions where they are technically supervised by doctors, but the doctors are typically not right next to them, and they’re providing very high level care, diagnosing patients, prescribing medications, administering medications, or anesthetizing patients for surgeries.
Nursing is a very diverse field that has many more specializations now. I think it’s come a very long way just as medicine in general has. There are lots of opportunities within nursing in healthcare too.
