Getting my adolescents back.

[hppygr8ful, ASN, RN, EMT-I]

Short history - after almost 20 years of psychiatric nursing working with all populations I finally found my home working with adolescent girls. Recently like the week between Christmas and New years I left on a Friday with 4 patients on the unit and came back on Monday to a full unit of acute adults. It seems the revenue stream of adolescents dried up so they shifted the girls that were left to the mixed gender unit and closed my all girl's unit.

Without going into too many identifying details I was offered the charge position on the mixed gender adolescent unit yesterday. They would like my answer tomorrow.

My only hesitation is that I don't want there to be a perception that I can't handle the adult population. I don't know why this is concerning me as I've never much cared what other people think. Just looking for insight from some of my fellow psych nurses. Adolescents are not an easy population because you have to deal with parents and the apples don't fall from the trees, but they are sort of my niche!

Hppy

[verene, MSN]

If they are your people then welcome the opportunity to care for them again and don't worry about working with adults! You already handle adults with psychiatric issues when you work with the parents.

As some one who works in adult psych... I'm not sure how many of my patients -developmentally speaking - ever progressed beyond adolescence anyway.

[Zookeeper44, RN]

I have worked with all psych populations and I loved (mostly!) the adolescents. Yes, the parents (if there ARE any) are usually as bad as the kids. IMO the adolescent population is more difficult than the adults...I always laughed at nurses who scoffed at how easy the adolescent unit was, and then cried like little babies when they were pulled to the unit ?