I'm currently a nursing student in my last rotation. :balloons: I'll be graduating in July. I'm currently torn between two areas that are at total opposite ends of the spectrum - NICU and psych. I know I would love to be in the NICU taking care of the sick babies, but psych is really my one true love. I just find it very interesting and I'd love the opportunity to work with mentally ill patients.
Currently I work as a PCA in the float pool at our really small local hospital. They have a mental health unit that I get sent to maybe 20% of the time and I always enjoy it down there. The staff is wonderful and overall I love the hospital, plus it's close to home. The rotation I'm in now is psych and I just KNEW it'd make me want to go in that direction more since it's the clinical I'd have just before graduating. Maybe that's a sign that I should do it? Heh, I don't know.
Most of the patients we get are usually just going through a depressive phase, or are suicidal. There's always a few really sick ones though, but the majority are not psychotic. I'm worried that I'd get burnt out 'babysitting' the very sick ones. I don't mean for that to sound bad, I couldn't think of a better way to put it. I know that as a PCA we've had geriatric patients that must stay confined to a chair or something for fear that they'd fall or some that go into other people's rooms thinking it's theirs. I know that as a PCA I get very frustrated with these patients because you have to keep an eye on them the entire shift when you have a lot of other things to do. Then again, possibly it's more of a PCA job to make sure they stay in the chair/don't wander into places they shouldn't be.
For all of you psych nurses - do you feel burned out at all? This is basically the only concern I have because I'm scared that if I want to leave psych to do something else then I'll have lost a lot of my med/surg skills. I know what the job entails and I love it...I just really don't want to burn out.
Any replies would be appreciated! Even if it's just 'I love my job!'.
i agree with other people - have several passions, change specialties - one possiblity is to look at your object of burnout differently. if you view something different do you feel different about it?
Florence Nightingale also stated something to the effect that women shouldn't become doctors either. Although she did some great things, we live in a totally different world.
hsieh
115 Posts
i agree with other people - have several passions, change specialties - one possiblity is to look at your object of burnout differently. if you view something different do you feel different about it?