I have been a nurse for over 30 years and have worked the ER for at least the last 25 years and I have always loved it. I work in a small rural hospital, close to the interstate and also in a farming community. We have a 10 bed ER and we see quite a bit of trauma. We don’t have any of the specialized teams the larger ERs have so we have to rely on each other. We work as a team to care for the patients. We take care of the high acuity trauma and critically ill patients as well as the lower acuity patients. When you are in a rural ER you perform tasks that you would not do in the larger Urban ERs. This is where I gained the majority of my knowledge.
With being a small hospital we also rely on help from the Med-surg and the ICU nurses, we all function as a team, that’s not to say that everyone gets along well 100% of the time, but usually problems that arise are from misunderstandings. There is not the pettiness that ER nurses are better than any of the other nurses that work in the hospital.
I have worked PRN at several facilities and the reasons I have named above is why I have worked full-time at this facility for over 30 years.
I hope you can find a nursing position that you are happy with.