Do you think nurses are a vulnerable population?

[BEBE1004]

HI,

We have been discussing vulnerable populations in my community health class and thought about nursing students in general. I thought that nursing students are not considered a vulnerable population since we have financial resources, social support, good environment (adequate food, water, shelter). However, another nursing student had mentioned that they're family is considered a vulnerable population since they consider their health insurance underinsured since it is expensive to cover all the children with the insurance covering only several immunizations. What are your thoughts?

Thanks

[llg, PhD, RN]

Everyone is vulnerable in one way or another. It's all a matter of degree ... and a matter of "vulnerable in what way?"

[Nursesomeday0211]

My background is in Health Promotion and Community Health and for the most part nurses are a vulnerable population. Not in the normal sense of the word but they are vulnerable. Most nurses make a decent amount of money, have food and water security, adequate shelter etc, but nurses do work with "vulnerable populations" more often than almost any other type of employee. We work with those individuals on a daily basis and you never know what they might be infected with. The amount of blood bourne disease a nurse in the ER/hospital is exposed to alone is HUGE. So, yes I would consider nurses a vulnerable population, just not in the typical sense of vulnerable.

[RNTutor, BSN, RN]

Everyone is vulnerable in one way or another. It's all a matter of degree ... and a matter of "vulnerable in what way?"

Agreed. To me, though, vulnerable typically means able to be easily taken advantage of because of many reasons, including little power, few resources, lack of knowledge of their rights, etc. Based on that definition, unfortunately, I do think that nursing students at many schools (but not all) are a vulnerable population.

But I doubt you'd ever see anything like that in a textbook :)