Scope of Practice of RPN/RN

Need to be a bit clearer do you mean Registered Psychiatric Nurse or Registered Practical Nurses? There is a province that uses Registered Psychiatric Nurse as RPN

Each province will have their own expectations but these links may help you understand

For Ontario http://www.cno.org/international_en/intro/expectations.htm

CSGNA http://www.csgna.com/role.htm

BC http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/leg/hpc/review/part-i/update-lpnurse.html

Very much depends on the province.

5cats

Registered Practical Nurse, sorry for the confusion.

OK, Ontario is the ONLY province that uses the term "RPN" across the rest of the country it's LPN.

I know that in Alberta our scope is so close to the RN's now, it's ridiculous. Basically I can't pull a central line, pierce blood or travisol bags. I can't do Charge and I can't take phone orders in acute care but can in continuing care.

Or is it only Ontario you are interested in?

Just Canada in general, I'm not interested in one particular province. Any information is helpful. I work with many Canadian nurses who are wonderful. They gave me a basic rundown on their experiences as a nurse in Canada.

What I thought was interesting was that you don't ever pick your clinical rotations up in Canada. I was told by a L & D nurse that during her rotation, she got to do L & D the whole time. I found that kind of odd. She has since went back to Canada, but she never went into detail about the RN program there.

Never heard of anyone doing that. We got told which hospital we would be at and which units to work.

The only "choice" we got was we could tell our instructors which services or branch of nursing we were interested in and hope they would let us do our final placement prior to graduation. A lot of people wanted postpartum but usually units will only take one RN and one PN student at a time on the final placements.

Some go to clinics, some to continuing care, geriatric programmes, other areas of the hospital (medicine, surgery, gynie).

Bumping this thread forward.

What is the scope of a RPN in Ontario, and how does it compare to the scope of the LPN within Alberta?

What is the hourly starting wage?

Just doing some comparative research.

At the hospital I work at, scope is pretty close...we can spike and hang blood, take phone orders, push IV meds, mix all our own meds, start IVs, take blood, scrub for surgery...PNs in Ontario do ALL the same controlled acts as RNs. They "say" PNs deal with only stable patients, but that isn't true many times. PNs in Ontario work in ERs, ICUs, etc...it really depends a LOT on what your particular employer "says" you can do/can't do...some utilise RPNs to their full scope of practice, others do not.

Thankyou for your responses. Can I ask what the starting wage is for a new grad PN? Here in AB it is $23 and change.

How do the RNs treat the PNs?

Here I find they refer to themselves as "nurses" and call us only LPNs. As in "we'll be holding a meeting with the nurses and the LPNs".

Petty of me to notice? Seems they don't want to call us nurses...

Starting salary varies depending where you work. From what I've seen, most hospitals in the Toronto area start RPNs out around $25, but some hospitals start out at $23-something. Drs offices pay less, and Long Term Care pays more. There are a few Long Term Cares in the Toronto area that start RPNs off at $30-something.

At my hospital, we are all called nurses. If they want to distinguish, they say "We need to look at the schedules of the RNs and RPNs".

Some RNs seem to feel the need to "supervise" RPNs, while others treat us as their total equals (as we are). Attitudes vary widely, depending on the personalities of those involved.

Hope this helps!