Is Emerge nursing harder than medicine, med-surg and rehab?

Nurses General Nursing

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I asked around and am getting mixed messages. It is hard for people in my school to go into emerg for the final semester of nursing school. It is a restricted You have to have an A average in order to get placed there.

I worked at a rehab for my IP, and almost everyone there said that rehab medicine was just as hard as emerg. But at the same time, they often complain about the condescending behaviour shown to them by nurses who worked in emerg during patient transfers. In addition, I talked to a nurse who recently immigrated to Canada, and she said that in her country, the high achieving nurses were picked and placed in emerg, the mediocre students went to med-surg and medicine and the low achieving nurses went into rehab, long-term care. What are your thoughts on this?

It saddens me to see ranks in nursing like this. There are so many places and areas that nurses and CNAs have to be, yet we seem to think some nursing areas have more value or a better status.

Not everyone can be an ER nurse or a OB nurse. There are nurses that are needed in med surg and rehab and LTCs. Why can we not see the same value placed on a wonderful Rehab nurse as an ER nurse. You all are working towards the same goal of helping people in need. Yet it seems people are impressed if you say I m a ER nurse and are all smiles. But another nurse will say they work in LTC and they get funny looks and negative comments like how can you work in that environment.

Well I say thank you to all you so called low achievers out there for you brilant job at rehab and Med Surg and LTC hats off to you because society wheather they want to admit it or not needs you!

Specializes in geriatrics.

I certainly do not consider myself a "low achieving nurse" because I've worked rehab and LTC. I enjoy these areas and I have two certifications in geriatric nursing. There are so many misconceptions about LTC.

Every area of nursing has its challenges and requires a different skill set.

Specializes in Pediatrics.

Worked both LTC/SNF and ER and your really comparing apples to oranges.

They have different types of stress and physically they are different.

Emotionally what you go through is different.

The type of nursing is different the ER is quick, treat them and street em or admit them. LTC you are caring for not only the chief complaint you are caring long term for that person looking at multiple long term complex issues

One type of nursing isn't better than the other.

Different personalities fit better into different disciplines of nursing.

Some nurses love ortho, cardiac, Peds, OB, geriatric, rehab, psych. One isn't better than the other.

Nurses need to support each other not think that there are areas of superior nursing.

Specializes in Medical-Surgical/Float Pool/Stepdown.

I personally think it's all about finding one's niche. An extremely smart being (which I feel most professional nurses are regardless of degree or specialty) would find one specialty harder or easier than the other just by their personality and interests. It's kinda like school, often students have an easier time in subjects they find interesting like science or math. I personally love science and hate math but that doesn't mean that I didn't get high A's in both subjects but science comes way more easily for me than math because I like it and find it more interesting. I think I would love the ED or ICU but I know I'm not a Peds person so this keeps me out of pursuing these specialty's at my hospital but if they didn't take Peds then I may have been more inclined to have sought out these specialty's instead of Med-Surg. Life would be a really boring existence if we were all the same.

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