Thank you both, TRAUMARN96 and boysinfirm, for you responses to my post.
I'm glad to know that Nurse Practitioners are able to be regular bedside RNs. I guess I was concerned that once a RN became a NP that their advanced education would hold them to a higher standard that for some reason would make it difficult for them to be hired as bedside nurses... I don't know what I was thinking because to me their advanced education should only be a plus at the bedside. (One of the reasons I've considered learning to be a NP is because I want to have their knowledge in my head which I feel would make me a better bedside caregiver...) I also was concerned that the hospital/facility would feel some need to pay the NP-bedside RN a higher salary than the regular bedside nurse salary due to their higher education and for that reason they might not want to hire NPs as bedside nurses. Again... I don't know what I was thinking...
As far as missing the difficult parts of bedside care such as the endless charting and hectic shifts where one never seems to be able to catch their tail so to speak, I am sure that would be a plus. As a NICU nurse, my little patients have tiny, cute poops and thankfully don't have many of the irritating things that adult patients bring to the environment. Some of our more difficult situations involve family dynamics; as you know, pediatric/neonatal patient care involves the family just as much as the patient...
The Neonatal Nurse Practitioners I've worked with generally don't do much hands on care unless we present them with a concern they need to check out. Of course, they help the Neonatologists with rounds and do assessments on certain babies and write orders/progress notes, attend high risk deliveries/cesarean sections, order ventillator changes, write admission orders, putting in umbilical catheters & PICCs, reviewing x-rays, etc., etc., etc... but as far as spending oodles of time with a baby, they simply do not have that as a part of their role. They do spend a good deal of time talking with parents and helping them understand their baby's plan of care and treatments, etc. To me it seems they spend most of their time "putting out fires" and working on discharge summaries in addition to their rounds on a few babies. Where I work now our NNPs mostly provide coverage from 7 pm to 7 am and the Neonatologists come in the morning. Our NNPs do rounds on the less critical babies when we have a high census, otherwise, they go home in the morning. At my previous job, we had NNPs around the clock who took more of a role in doing rounds with writing orders on the less critical patients, doing discharge summaries, and some were responsible for attending to babies in the follow-up clinic (where NICU graduates are followed at regular intervals for problems until they are about 3 years old).
I'm learning that there is a big difference in the everyday activities of NPs in different areas of nursing, which only makes sense. Again I thank you both for your posts, it means quite a bit to me to hear your perspectives.
Would you like to comment?
) actually become a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner someday.
Re: As a NP do you miss bedside care?
