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Question

Are we educating nurses for the bed side or educating them to leave it?

Here's a question I've been thinking about:

If we encourage nurses to earn BSN, MSN, DNP, MBA, and doctoral degrees, why are so many of those career paths designed to lead them away from direct patient care?

We tell nurses to continue learning, develop leadership skills, understand research, improve systems, and influence healthcare. Then we often measure career advancement by how far they move from the bedside.

Is that what we intended?

Or should healthcare create more opportunities for highly educated nurses to remain in clinical practice while using their expanded knowledge to improve patient care, mentor colleagues, and strengthen healthcare delivery?

This isn't a criticism of advanced education. Quite the opposite.

It's a question about whether we've aligned nursing education with nursing careers.

I'd be interested to hear what nurses, educators, students, and healthcare leaders think.

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    • Author

    So do we want to fix this pattern or do we all want to be chiefs leaving no Indians to care for the patients or eventually have the patients take care of themselves

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    • Expert

    HHmm - interesting. However, many of us that are now APRNs certainly DO patient care - just in a different way.

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    traumaRUs said:

    HHmm - interesting. However, many of us that are now APRNs certainly DO patient care - just in a different way.

    Agree.

    In a past life I was a CNS for which I needed a masters. I was still in patient contact 100% giving "care" - my patients just weren't in bed.

    I think these things are more dictated by the jobs market than by the levels of education.

    I've seen excellent research done at inpatient level by nurses doing their masters, doctorates etc. Such nurses don't necessarily leave the bedside.

    When I trained (early 1980s), jobs were few and far between, there was nurse unemployment and people stayed in bedside jobs for years because of insecurity. Fast forward just 15 years and there were jobs galore, shortages, agency nurses, bank nurses, and it was possible to change jobs very easily. Promotion came easier. People were in Charge Nurse rôles after just a few years qualified - unheard of previously, and thus went off into specialist rôles much earlier. Previously they might have waited longer or never done so at all.

    We also have to get out of this one size fits all mentality that you're somehow not evolving if you don't "progress" to a specialist rôle. You can evolve in bedside rôles. I went from a specialist rôle back to the bedside - and considered that an evolution, not a backward step.

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