BC Nursing

[fiba]

Will picking to enroll in a psychiatric nursing program

close one's opportunities to work in

ER and hospital environments? such as VGH and UBC

is it better to get a BSN to become an RN instead. I thought about psychiatric nursing due to volunteer, work and life experiences with that field, but also find other areas of nursing interesting as well.

[Nurse_Bo]

RPN (registered psychiatric nurse) is recognized in BC, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Australia, U.K, New Zealand, and a couple states in the U.S. There may be further qualifications that you may need to consider if you were to work as an RPN outside of BC and Alberta.

It is true that with the nature and environment where many RPNs work they have less exposure and knowledge in medical. I do have RPN colleagues who work in areas that has broadened their medical knowledge and exposed them to a bit more medically focused tasks (ECT on post anesthetic care unit; psychiatric emergency; geriatric/neuro-psych; transitional care; clinic; adult eating disorder). Some of my colleagues had no desire in medical acute care or interest in maintaining skills in that area and just passionately enjoyed mental health, so they went straight into the psychiatric nursing program without hesitation. Like I mentioned before psych nursing is limiting, especially if you want to explore a wide variety of fields within nursing. But mental health is still an exciting field that I personally love, there are many things you could do within that area ( I listing multiple examples in my posts). I took a look at what you highlighted from my first response. General ER would not be within an RPN scope, you would most likely need your RN or (for some employers) LPN.

[Nurse_Bo]

I just wanted to clarify, general inpatient psych patients can have serious medical problems and RPNs can have the knowledge and skills to assess and treat some of these problems. And codes do happen on psych units. But the exposure to the medical acuity is less compared to an RN on the med/surg unit.

[renzlao, MSN, APRN]

I work in a downtown ER in Vancouver. We do have RPNs for our psych unit but because we only have 5-8 beds in total, there is not really a lot of opportunities for them. RNs however is a different story, ER RNs are in demand in the lower mainland, one hospital I know that I pick up shifts once in a while have more than 10 full time lines available. This is despite the hospital training RNs every year for specialty courses.

[fiba]

I work in a downtown ER in Vancouver. We do have RPNs for our psych unit but because we only have 5-8 beds in total, there is not really a lot of opportunities for them. RNs however is a different story, ER RNs are in demand in the lower mainland, one hospital I know that I pick up shifts once in a while have more than 10 full time lines available. This is despite the hospital training RNs every year for specialty courses.

ER in Vancouver, so interestingl!!