Primary care to acute care

[amalay, MSN, RN]

Is there anyone out there than went from practicing in primary care as an NP to acute care? I am interested in going back to school to get my acute care NP in the next year or two and would love to hear about anyone's experience with the transition!

What was your motivation to make the change? Did you feel like the acute care curriculum and clinicals helped prepare you enough to work in your inpatient/hospitalist role?

[Bumashes, MSN, APRN, NP]

I graduated with a degree as an AGNP and practiced outpt internal medicine and urgent care, then I changed jobs after a couple of years and got a position as a hospitalist. So while I don't exactly meet your criteria of going back to school and then going into acute care, I figured I was close enough. LOL!

I am in south MS, and our BON's rules on practice settings are pretty lax. Now, as an AGNP, I am NOT going to work in an ICU environment. Never want to anyway. But being a hospitalist doing med-surg and inpt rehab roundings is actually what I wanted. And during my AGNP program, I was allowed to stay with one preceptor the entire time if it was in an area that I was aiming for after graduation, so I chose an Internal Medicine physician who sees her pts in her clinic and also when they are admitted to her in the hospital. My RN experience prior to NP was about 7 years of mostly ER, with a piddly bit of med-surg right at the start of being an RN. So I felt I had a good acute-ish nursing background to work off of when I did clinicals in both outpt and inpt. My AGNP program was probably focused about 75% on primary care, but it did include some education on the diagnoses most often admitted to the inpt setting: CHF, COPD, A-fib, PE, PNA, etc. So when combined, I feel like my schooling and my nursing background together provided for a good foundation to learn from. Also, the couple years as an NP doing internal medicine and urgent care prior to being hired into my current hospitalist gig helped build my confidence as a newby NP. And the onboarding process at my facility was pretty good, so as to introduce me to my new inpt NP role. The docs I work with are very good at continually teaching and making you think, so I feel I have a great place to learn in and very valuable support from my peers. Was there a learning curve? Duh. But anytime you go from one job to another there will definitely be some deficits needing fixing. But I certainly didn't feel lost or unprepared or anything. It's been wonderful, actually.