Laugh, cry, rejoice, embrace, hope, dance and pray. This sums up the range of empathy needed by someone who wants to work in critical care. If you have the emotional and cerebral maturity of a two-year old, you are perfect for the job. A two-year old has no barriers, is amazingly inquisitive and is totally transparent. When a patient needs critical care owing to his critical condition, you have got to be a nurse, a friend, a family member and a human being. This is one profession that will ask you to leave your cynical outlook at the door. So, what’s needed to enter the Critical Care Nursing profession? Let’s find out.
One crucial aspect of any nursing career is a strong education - fortunately, there are many ways for you to earn a quality critical care nursing degree. Online schools are becoming more and more popular, for example.
The most important thing is to look at this career like a calling as opposed to a “career.” It is not going to be an easy occupation and will oftentimes be laden with heartache and heartbreak. After all, you will be dealing with patients who may or may not live while on your watch. That’s hard to swallow, especially after investing your all into a patient.
The other factors that you will have to take into consideration are your capacity for:
- Learning something new everyday.
- Enjoyment of coming up with medical solutions.
- Eagerness to get into new technologies.
- Working with families as they deal with medical crises.
- Jumping into different aspects of critical care even at the last minute.
Based on your answers from the factors stated above, you will get a good feel if Critical Care Nursing is the right career for you. If it is, you are now ready to get into the next phase. Here’s how to become a critical care nurse.
- You need educational attainment and continuing education. A calling in Critical Care Nursing requires you to be a graduate of nursing (Associate or Bachelor degree) and become registered soon after graduation. You can move on to taking a Master of Science in Nursing degree if you prefer but the Associate or Bachelor degree will suffice.
- Obtain your Registered Nurse (RN) license. You have the coveted nursing cap and the nameplate that states your name. How about adding the letters “RN?” For this you need to get your license. The university you graduated from can help you get into the proper licensing school to take your NCLEX-RN test.
- Take the critical care test. Soon after getting your RN license, you must obtain a certification from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN) for you to be able to get into the critical care discipline that you prefer e.g. adult, newborns, babies and young children.
- Prepare yourself emotionally and physically. Working in critical care often means being around the hospital a lot working odd hours and long shifts, so you have to be able to endure and get used to the physical strain of your calling. Another thing is dealing with the fact that you may be around people with infectious diseases and though great care, strict by-the-book procedures, and stringent sanitary measures are employed to protect you and the entire medical crew, accidents may happen. Lastly, the emotional stress of seeing people struggle with their medical condition is something that you have to be prepared for. Often, you might feel helpless in the face of it all.
- Expect to get paid fairly competitively. Critical Care Nurses have a base annual salary of more than $60,000.00 but the numbers go up the longer you stay and as you step up the nursing ladder. This is just the basic pay and excludes other perks and benefits like overtime pay, pension, bonuses, training and continuing education. Once you have all of the requirements, you can start searching for critical care nursing job opportunities.
However, more than the monetary rewards of this calling, at the end of the day, Critical Care Nursing is all about genuinely caring for and taking care of really sick people who can do without the coldness of their condition and their hospital room.