Hey Guys!
So this article is an oldie, but a goodie!
I was searching for information on Alternative Nursing Careers and found it on NurseWeek.com. While I don’t agree with all of the suggestions, like “travel nursing being hot right now,” as the travel nursing market has definitely cooled in the last few years, I do like that it highlights alternatives for nurses and the various ways it stimulate outside-of-the-box thinking!
Let me know what you think!
Cheers,
Anna
Roads less traveled
A tour of some of the uncommon career paths in nursing
By Diane Sussman
In 20-plus years of nursing, Donna Doetsch, RN, has been a traveling nurse, a home care nurse, a dialysis nurse, a burn unit nurse, an intensive care nurse and a wound care specialist. But when the Grosse Pointe, Mich., resident began feeling “burned out,” she decided to revisit home care. Now, Doetsch is happily employed as co-director of an assisted living program, where she does everything from counseling families to picking out paint colors.
“I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades, and I love it,” she said. “No day is the same.”
After nine years in med/surg and nine more teaching health sciences, Katherine Ricossa, MS, RN, spends her days “networking, coordinating” and taking her nurse Barbies to schools to talk about health professions.
The Santa Clara, Calif., resident is special projects manager for the state-run Regional Health Occupations Resource Center, which helps communities meet their needs for health care workers by developing occupational programs at local community colleges. “All that experience I gained in nursing I’m applying in a whole new way,” she said. “And it’s fun because you’re not limited to anything except what’s in your own head.”
Both Ricossa and Doetsch reflect what is now the norm in the United States: careers that unfold in two or three stages. Only in their case, they didn’t have to leave nursing to find a satisfying sequel.
What nurses have
What nurses bring to the job market often is underestimated and inadequately understood. “It sounds simplistic, but it’s actually really powerful – the nursing process,” said Karen Johnson Brennan, Ed.D., RN, professor and interim director at the School of Nursing at San Francisco State University.
“By nursing process, I mean the ability to gather data, analyze data, make clinical inferences and take actions, and evaluate those actions,” she continued. “Some people are only good at one aspect – they see only the evaluation part. But nurses see the whole picture.”
Hospitals will always be the largest employers of nurses, but nurses increasingly are being wooed by other sectors such as pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, corporations and law firms. While some areas are good, others are white-hot.
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Hey guys,
Just found this article and wanted to make sure you got a chance to read it. It’s from Nurseweek Magazine in 2002, but the nuggets of wisdom it contains are still as valuable as ever. What’s interesting to me when I read this article is that as great as it was to start a bricks and mortar business back in 2002, it is infinitely easier to start an online business based on your nursing expertise nowadays! We owe a ton of respect and a great deal of our current success to the pioneer nurse entrepreneurs that have gone before us!
Enjoy the article and let me know what you think in the comments box below!
Cheers,
Anna
When Opportunity Knocks…
Nurse entrepreneurs strike out on their own to find richer rewards, challenges
By Bree LeMaire, MS, RN
It was Saturday and Karon White Gibson, RN, and Joy Smith Catterson, RN, were making visits to several patients in their new home care business. They were also on their way to a wedding, so they were dressed more sophisticated than usual for a home visit.
They went to the designated address for the visit where the family welcomed them and offered them a cup of tea. Then they sat and chatted a bit with the family, as they were new in the home care business and wanted to establish a rapport with their patient. The family introduced them to their daughter and her husband.
Following tea and the introductions, White asked, “Where’s the patient?”
“Well, there was no patient because we were at the wrong house,” White said. That was when White and Catterson learned that people like to have nurses visit them, even when they’re not expected.
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I have fun playing Texas Hold ‘Em with friends. Did you know that playing the game or watching shows like World Tour of Poker can help you succeed in business?
I didn’t realize that while I was learning to play, I was gaining valuable business skills that have translated into money in my pocket. (And no, I don’t mean by gambling).
Let me explain. I learned the four following things from playing poker.
First, I learned how to make the best of the cards I was dealt.
I learned when to play a hand, when to take risks, and when to throw the cards away and wait to act with better ones. This kind of discernment helps a business owner make sound decisions about working with assets and when to cut a project loose if it’s not producing good results.
I found that when starting your own business, you will invest 2 assets—your time and your money. Depending on where you start, you’ll use one of these assets more than the other. A realistic understanding of which asset you’re working from can help you make the most of what you’ve got.
The second lesson I learned from poker is that you’ve got to use a strategy to win.
Good players spend years learning from each other and developing a strategy that’s right for them. Their strategy is reliable and flexible enough to adapt to new situations.
They learn something new from each game, and they actively look for the lessons when they lose a hand. They know how much they’re willing to bet in an evening, and they aren’t pushed off course by setbacks because their strategy takes the slow time into account.
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“Escape the Bedside, Make A Difference & (finally) Earn What You’re Worth!”
Let me ask you guys a few critical questions.
Are you:
- Tired of working yourself to the bone & never getting ahead?
- Exhausted by grueling 12-hour shifts?
- Overwhelmed by ever-increasing workloads?
- Feeling overworked & understaffed?
- Alienated by the lack of respect & support on your unit?
- Sick & tired of being sick & tired?
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Nurses have been at the forefront of patient care for a long time. This uniquely positions us within our nursing jobs to ask some of the most vital, creative and high-quality questions in healthcare. And as the great Tony Robbins once said, “Quality questions create a quality life.”
So what does being uniquely positioned to ask good questions mean to the average nurse?
Well, asking the right kind of questions, can lead to some pretty creative thinking about the real-world answers to those questions. And, as many Nurse Entrepreneurs have discovered, answering the most common questions or solving the most common problems in healthcare can not only be a great service to patients, families and healthcare providers, but it can also be a very lucrative endeavor.
Terms such as EntrepreNurse™, Nurse Entrepreneur and Nurse Leader are becoming more common and serve as important new topics for discussion, even though many are not familiar with what these relatively new concepts mean.
What is an EntrepreNurse™or a Nurse Entrepreneur?
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