Less stress being a bedside RN or CRNA

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Hello. I was just curious about this. Do you run around like a chicken with its head cut off too??? Do you deal with patients families? What are some of the similarities and what are the major differences?

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Specializes in CRNA, Finally retired.

The amount of stress experienced is highly individual. Anesthesia is very stressful because your interventions need to be quick, moment to moment, even for bread and butter cases. Anyone can be OK but excellence has to be earned through paying attention and being able to adapt your practice quickly, and you have to keep your wits in emergencies because the rest of the room is often standing around gaga waiting for supervision. However, floor nursing, while you don't have to make many moment to moment decisions, you have a lot more going on and have to really sharpen your time management skills along with people "management." Totally different set of stressors but can wear you down equally. The steep part of the learning curve is changing yourself to accommodate living with such a stressful job.

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Thanks for the reply. Great information. I'm a LPN hoping to become a RN next year. I'm deciding between anesthetist or NP. I've shadowed both. I used to work with crna's in a GI clinic so I'm leaning more towards that. I guess we'll see.

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Specializes in CRNA, Finally retired.

You have plenty of time to think about it. First you have to get your RN and then get that ICU experience for CRNA school. I know that most of the CRNA schools repeat the AANA mantra about that 1 year ICU requirement, but the fact is that the majority of students who are accepted have 5 - 7 years of experience.

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Wow that's a long time in the ICU. A lot of good experience to be had. Does your experience in ICU really help with being a crna?

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Specializes in CRNA, Finally retired.

They don't want to have to start from scratch with critical care topics when you get to school. You should already know your drips, invasive monitoring, ABG's, reading 12-lead EKG, ventilators, etc. So yes, ICU is important. I could argue that all those years don't have to be devoted to ICU and some ICU's can be stifling (if house staff is tripping over each other) but yes, anesthesia is the ultimate critical care so you want to be pretty buff before you show up at your CRNA program.

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Ok. Good to know?

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I'm working in a military hospital on a med Surg floor and have learned a lot!

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