Nursing....... any regrets ?

[CHEESEW]

Hello i'm a nursing student who finished his first year and after sitting through 6 weeks of clinical attachments i'm beginning to hate nursing. i entered nursing of course with an ideal to save lives , but the 6 weeks spent at a general medical ward and a surgical orthopedic ward has shown me otherwise.

From my observation , nurses they do roll calls ******** about doctors , serve medications , escort patients to the toilets , serve bedpans/ urinals , clean patients up . That's what nurses can do .

However things like oxygen therapy , pain management , cases of vomiting and severe medical issues . the trend in this pattern is that we would require a doctor to assess and plan out his/her required treatment and management of the patient so we nurses have to implement . I remember asking my RN what we have to do when a patient is vomiting and she answered "just get her a vomit bowl the doctor will come " and i stood there baffled expecting more than what she could answer.

Why do we then learn about physical assessments , pharmacology , anatomy & physiology when nobody in clinicals care about what u know. The hours spent reading up on orthopedic textbooks , pathology just to prepare for clinical is wasted because we are supposed to be kept in our place and allow the doctors to do their thing because of the disparity of decision making between nurses and doctors. and that made me so affected that nurses couldn't do anything more than they could do

Right now i'm facing a dilemma between doing biomedical engineering, life sciences or just continue with nursing to eventually hope that all of the issues i'm facing would turn for the better....

[TheCommuter, BSN, RN]

Welcome! I assume you are not in North America due to some of the terminology you use, in addition to the notable lack of autonomy exercised by the nurses with whom you worked.

Be cognizant that the majority of the members on these forums are nurses and nursing students in the United States and Canada, where nurses routinely utilize the nursing process to assess, diagnose, plan the patients' care, identify optimal outcomes, implement, and evaluate.

Do I regret becoming a nurse? No. For me, nursing facilitates a middle-class lifestyle that 50 percent of American households could only dream of.