New to allnurses and I need some feedback!

[AndyBRN]

Hello everyone!

My name is Andrew and I am a Registered Nurse, practicing in Canada. I currently am working as a Registered Nurse in Mental Health, practicing on the inpatient unit, short stay crisis and psychiatric emergency services. I have been doing this for 1.5 years since I graduated in 2011. I love what I do with my patients and love this area of nursing. Every day I come to work I look forward to it and enjoy building relationships with my patients and providing care for them.

I am work casually on a Complex Continuing Care Unit for the past 2 months and I absolutely hate it! I get anxiety thinking about going there and at the end of the day, I don't enjoy the work I do there. But for some reason, I feel compelled to subject myself to the stress, because people seem to "covet" medical nursing so much and don't give psychiatric nurses the credit they deserve for the work they do. I picked up this job to keep my skills current and learn some new experiences, however I feel the job is very stressful, and the workload is quite overwhelming (6 total care patients, bed bound, acute issues, 3/6 of them have trachs and PEGs, etc) and I am seriously considering quitting, but I don't know what to do. I have spoken with the educator and fellow staff, and they all validate my concerns about the overwhelmingly heavy workload.

Do any of you have any ideas for me? Are there other psychiatric nurses here that share the same feelings that I do? I love psych and this is the speciality that I think I want to work in, however I feel like I should have these medical skills for the sake of the skills, for when I apply for my Master's program.

[traumaRUs, MSN, APRN]

Moving to mental health nursing for more answers.

[hamdy usama]

I'm doing my Master's degree in psychiatric nursing ,and I think it's a really good field

[TerpGal02, ASN]

If you are a psych nurse, you're a psych nurse. It takes a certain kind of person to thrive in that envioronment. If you dislike "medical" nursing, you don't like it. There's no point in stressing yourself out so much in the PRN job. If you want to keep your med/surg skills up to date, maybe think about working PRN in a geri-psych unit. A lot of them have co-morbid medical problems that require management while thhey are in the hospital. I am a psych nurse and love it. I didn't particularly care for med/surg nursing in school but thrived in psych so I just jumped right in. I know I'm never going to like med/surg so there's really no point for me to do it.