It takes a certain kind of person to work with children, especially in situations where they sometimes face grim prospects. However, if you have the necessary resilience and enthusiasm, going into pediatric nursing could be the best career move you ever make. It’s an incredibly rewarding field where you’ll have some amazing encounters and feel inspired every day by your young patients. You’ll enjoy great opportunities and a working life full of variety.
You’ll make a real difference
No other patients need the support of good nurses quite as much as children do. You’ll explain procedures in age-appropriate language so that they understand what’s happening to them. You’ll help them to cope with the stress of injections or pain caused by illness, injury or surgery. You’ll talk through their fears with them and provide comfort when they have to be apart from their families, as well as helping worried parents and other family members to cope with what’s happening. Thanks to you, a difficult experience will become much easier to handle, and you’ll get to see most of your patients recover, with bright futures to look forward to.
You’ll enjoy a flexible career
Specializing in family nursing is easy with the UIndy FNP program because you can study online part-time while you work, and still graduate in under three years. You’ll then be able to work across a range of different fields associated with family and pediatric medicine. You might work exclusively on a children’s ward; move around between departments to support young patients with specialist needs; work in the community visiting children at home or in a specialist medical center; or assist your local social work department in its efforts to prevent abuse or work in a school, responding to accidents and supporting children with chronic illnesses. Moving between posts is surprisingly easy and there’s no shortage of opportunities.
Studying an online MSN-FNP program at a university such as the University of Indianapolis can provide you with the support you need to manage deadlines, and the clinical placement department will help you secure a local placement site.
No two days are the same
When you work in pediatric nursing, you’ll be dealing with a wide range of different conditions, and you’ll see very different patient responses to them. You’ll work with teenagers who are trying to take more control over their own lives in difficult situations, and infants who are trying to express themselves and explain what’s wrong with very limited language. You’ll meet patients whose curiosity about bodies and medicine knows no bounds and help others as they adjust to disabilities and figure out how they can move forward in life. Every day brings something different, which means that you’ll never have to worry about getting bored.
Whereas nurses usually move around between different specialties over the course of their careers, pediatric medicine is a field to which many choose to make a lasting commitment. There’s simply nothing else that compares when it comes to personal engagement and emotional reward. It can be hard and there will be days when you find yourself in tears. However, overall, pediatric nurses report high levels of job satisfaction, because whatever you find yourself doing, you’ll never doubt that it matters.
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