Do you feel stuck in nursing?

Nurses General Nursing

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With so many nurses seeming dissatisfied with the profession, do you feel most stay because they feel stuck? And I base my statement about the dissatisfaction on talking to other nurses in the real world setting. :confused:

Specializes in Med-Surg, Trauma, Ortho, Neuro, Cardiac.

I'm pretty much stuck I guess, if you mean am I going to do anything else in life, the answer is no. I'll more than likely always be a nurse.

But I'm not dissatisfied with nursing, so I don't feel the need to pursue another career.

Sometimes, when the going gets tough and I think about switching to another nursing job, I realize with ten years of raises, both merit/eval and across the board market adjustments, that I might be stuck in this job.

I wouldn't make the money I'm making now by switching jobs, I don't think. Unless maybe I traveled or went agency. But I like being settle.

I don't "feel" stuck and am quite happy (most of the time).

We are fired, reprimanded or given trouble if we complain about being treated like garbage. A nurses aide treated me with such open contempt because I thought my job involved more than helping her that I was told, yes a problem, but they are hard to find.

Months filling out applications for these places desperate for nurses, they don't call. If they are so desparate???

I love nursing, am called a lousy team player because I want patients first. Stuck cause I have bills.

Oh well. I'll work at a bookstore if they'll hire me.

I dont feel stuck, I feel like I might be sticking it out a bit longer than I should be at my current workplace but I'm doing that in the hopes that I can change things or make them better for the patients...

my mom (bless her heart) works in a plastics factory ,and she is stuck in that job because she has bills to pay and didnt have much working experience when I was growing up...this isnt the case with nursing, our education affords us opportunities that other careers. jobs what have you simply dont offer.

if youre not happy and feeling stuck its time to get "un stuck" life is far too short to feel trapped in ANY aspect of your life, especially in nursing , where many times you spend more time at work than you do with your own family or friends.

there are problems in nursing , retention of nurses being a huge huge one right now , nurses are realizing that infact they are not stuck and that options within nursing DO exist and are there for the taking!

Nursing is a wonderful profession ... dont box yourself into the idea that you need to do one thing or another in nursing forever

simply not true

bring your knowledge, skills and experience to a new table. You are allowed to want to do something other than nursing!

Anne - dont let the actions of the ppl youre encountering now drive you to the bookstore just yet , your patients need you , you are their advocate and I'm sure youre an excellent one at that!

There are all kinds of stuck. Stuck in nursing? No, but not quite ready to trade the politics of the hospital for those of academia (where they have no idea of what life and death is really all about and so have skewed priorities.) One thing we don't realize is how much freedom we actually have as nurses. I see people stay in miserable situations because they don't want to lose a couple weeks vacation time, take a cut in pay or prestige, or drive a bit further. Misery is optional.

Originally posted by SmilingBluEyes

and what are you all doing about this, just1?

I go to work, take care of my patients and pretty much enjoy watching her try to find things wrong....:p :p :p

I don't feel stuck because I've been fortunate enough to have RN relatives who have shown me by example how many different ways being a nurse can lead to all kinds of different jobs. My sister has been a nurse for 18 years and likes to change areas or positions every 4 or 5 years or so. She says it keeps her fresh, is exciting to learn a new area, get to know new co-workers, and keeps her from becoming burned out in a certain area. She's seen too many "old timers" "stuck" in a certain job/department because they stayed in the same job/department for toooooo long. They found that they became overly comfortable in their area and as time progressed they realized they hadn't kept up with changes in other areas so they felt "stuck" in their current job. That was a really good lesson to learn! One RN cousin sells fancy, expensive ICU beds to hospitals and another RN cousin is a pharmaceutical rep. Both of these cousins are happy and make a very good living although they have no patient contact anymore. I worked with one RN who was able to speak French fluently. She was hired as a flight attendant on the spot because she was able to speak the foreign language an was also an RN... she was considered "cream of the crop" for overseas flight attendant applicants. Now she travels back and forth from the US to France, Belgium and Switzerland.

If we feel "stuck" in our job, it's because we've let ourselves feel that way. We sometimes forget how to "think outside of the box" when we are unhappy...

Just my 2 cents...

Getting burnt out is a disease. The processes that lead to burn-out are indiscriminate of your endevor. That means if you are burned out, it may be convient to blame it on your "job" but in reality yewd probably burn out on anything atthat point in your life. Though our burn out phase may be at an early onset, lifestyle usually influences your burn out morbidity. 105410092 Some high stress jobs are said to cause burn out, but burn out can always be avoided with sleep and proper nuitrition. Physical activity is usually absent in burn outs. 94259255

Im sorry

I agree 100% with cheerfuldoer. It is NOT nursing that has you stuck in your career; it is your bills and possibly your financial commitment to family members. Even then your predicament is created through the perception of your situation.

With the economy currently in recession it can be very difficult to change careers. But there is some evidence the economy is changing now. So if you don't like nursing, you might have other opportunities in the years ahead. Hopefully, you will just find another area of nursing that interests you.

Originally posted by abrenrn

Months filling out applications for these places desperate for nurses, they don't call. If they are so desparate???

This absolutely blows my mind every time I read it!!! And let me tell you, I have read it more than once here on this website. I am convinced there is no nursing shortage. Having been involved with other careers with real shortages, I find those patterns easy to identify. Managers are quick to hire new personnel and eliminate the shortage. I don't see that happening in this career. The supply meets the demand. Perhaps better said, the oversupply meets the demand.

Let's face it.. When we graduated from nursing school (for me it was around the time of that Florence lady), nursing was wonderful and ambitions were high. We were going to change the entire Nursing World.

Well folks.. I don't know about you, but it just didn't happen. I learned real fast that the Nursing profession was more bureaucratic (or however you spell that word) than the federal government. If you're a clinician, and want to stay that way, you're stuck.. period. I've been in both worlds.. administrative and clinical. I was in administration for over 10 years and to be honest, I just could not put up with the BS anymore. I constantly butted heads with hospital administration to protect the nurses.

Twenty Five years later.. I'm still a clinician. But now I'm old enough that I can fight back without losing sleep. Yep.. I'm stuck but the only thing I am concerned about anymore is what happens to my patients.

p.s. I love fighting with insurance case managers now.. especially when I know a patient really needs a service they just don't want to pay for.:devil:

Steve B. Medi Menu

Mario, I have to disagree with you on this one. Burn out has causes that run much deeper than just from lifestyle and environment. I was working out 4X a week, taking great care of myself and my diet, and one day I went to work and watched a woman bleed to death as I replaced her blood volume three times and put two central lines in her. She coded twice and finally went into DIC and bled out of her superior vena cava. I went home, took off my very bloody uniform and threw them in the dumpster. The next week I went to Mexico for a month and came back to a job at Nordstrom. Burn-out is real, how you deal with it is part of the lifestyle thing.

Lisa, PTSD is real and doesn't always have to be full blown. Maslow's triangle does not have a crack in it for burn out. When it's your time to burn out...it's your time to burn out. Winning the lottery or living in a perpetual state of shopping and unlimited money can not prevent you from burning out. :-)

Also, if you have a job that you don't like, you will burn out like a comet headed directly into the sun.

Nursing has too much technology for me to burn out on. i will always try to imagine just what is happening at all times with everything, which makes for a whimsical/mechanical day set to music in my mind. I'm not on drugs.

Mario, are you sure you are not on drugs???? Because I would love to have an infusion of optimism about returning to ICU. And if you are not on drugs, maybe Maslow was.:-) PTSD does not have to be full blown, but sometimes it is. and the Nordstrom thing was work, not shopping. Although it would be nice if we all had the luxury of taking some serious time off when we need a break. We do alot of very serious work, and we are humans too. Call it burnout or PTSD we all get it occasionally, and have to take a breather,

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