Nerdy RN

ChitownRN17 hit the mark on a few of the pros and cons. It is nice to have weekends and holidays off, but patients get mad when you call (they only want to speak to a doctor!). I often get chewed out by patients when I answer the phone; they only want their Providers. I feel like I am wasting my skills and knowledge working in ambulatory care, but at least I know I will have off x-mas, turkey day, etc., etc.

I'll be honest, I don't remember. I have been looking all. And, of course, I tossed the flash cards right after I took the exam. Sorry. The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) website has some good reference material. Good luck!

Yes, I took the exam. It wasn’t too difficult; I think the NCLEX was harder! It was roughly the same type of questions, but when I took the NCLEX I had never done any nursing before. But now that I’ve been an RN for many years, I just used critical thinking to answer the questions. I did study of course. I purchased a stack of study guide index cards online and it helped a lot. The cards pretty much just cemented what I already knew. The test was 150 questions and it took me about two hours. I received the results the second I hit the submit button at the end. So now, I can put RN-BC behind my name. I definitely advise you take it. My boss was impressed!

I thought nursing was going to be easy because I aced all my exams in school. I had a high GPA so I thought that equaled great nursing skills. Then, when I hit the floor, I felt like I never even went to nursing school. You will be asked one hundred questions a day by patients and families and ancillary staff, and none of the answers are stuff you learned in school. You just slowly get a little better and a little smarter, but you will never have the answers to everything!

Y'all, I have been working in an Ambulatory Care clinic for the last few years, and I felt that getting certified was the right thing to do. I am scheduled to take the exam next month. Has anyone else out there taken the certification exam? How was it? Did it pay off in the long run, etc? Any feedback would be appreciated. Thank you.

Respect is a two-way street. When I was working corrections, I probably got more respect from inmates than I ever do with the patients I have now (I work in an Ambulatory Care unit in a large metro hospital). The patients I work with now treat me like crap! The hardened criminals actually respected me. People talk smack about Correctional Nursing, but I loved it. In my clinic now, I just book appointments and refill meds (the boring stuff). I actually felt like a real nurse in the prison.

I work in a busy Ambulatory Care clinic, and we have RRTs all the time. Typically, it is only one-to-two ER RNs and an RT. In our hospital, a RRT is meant to be a low key event: it is not advertised over the hospital intercom. The ER RN who shows up decides whether it should be a full-blown Code, or the patient should be transported to ER before it comes to that (which is always what happens). There are no MD who show up, or 100 Residents wanting to get their hands dirty. RRTs should be on the DL, until they need to be upgraded.