A nursing career requires a lot of dedication and commitment to help people. It gives you the satisfaction of helping many patients and seeing them smiling.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of being a nurse to help you be sure whether it is the right profession for you or not.
Pros:
**1. Great compensations and benefits: **A registered nurse earn an excellent salary and receive other benefits. If you’re working as a traveling nurse, you can receive high payments than other types of nurses.
**2. Make a difference: **Nurses are dedicated to helping and caring for others. They interact daily with patients during life-changing moments and able to have an impact on a patient’s life.
**3. Trusted profession: **Nursing is a well-respected and most trusted career. There is a sense of pride that comes in working with a trusted and respected profession.
4. Freedom and flexibility: You can work on full-time bases, part-time or a nurse on call. If you love adventure, you can work as a traveling nurse.
5. Simple to get ready for work: Nurses always wear a simple uniform every day at work, therefore, you will not face any frustration as to what clothes you’re supposed to wear in the morning.** **
**6. Different specialist options to pursue: You can specialize as a critical care nurse, nephrology nurse or any other specialization. There various options to choose from. **
**7. Flexible hours: Working a 12-hour shift for 3 days or 10-hour shift for 4 days in a week leaves you with many off days to travel or spend more time with your family. **
8. Each day is different: In other careers, you can predict how your typical day would be like but in a nursing career, each day or night is different. Each day’s work is determined by the patient’s ailment.** **
**9. Help to save lives: When you contribute to making a change in the patient’s condition, you save their life. This is nothing more satisfying than seeing your patients recover well from illness. **
**10. Work in many places: **Depending on your own preferences, you can work in different rural, urban or overseas hospitals.
Cons:
**1. Shift work: Nurses work inform of shifts. **A normal work can go for like 12 hours or 10 hours in a row. You’re also required to work on shifts during weekends and holidays.
**2. Difficult patients: There are patients who are difficult to deal with especially those with mental illness and it may take you a lot of hard work and time to calm them down. **
**3. Dealing with body fluids and viruses: **Being a nurse you’re exposed to blood and other smelly body fluids as you interact with patients and some of these fluids can pose a health risk to the nurse.
**4. Always on your feet: Nursing is a very demanding profession and you will always have to keep on walking and standing for long when serving the patients. **
**5. Underappreciated: **Nurses are always underappreciated and not all patients recognize and appreciate their hard work. Some patients with stressful personal issues can unleash their frustrations on the nurse.
**6. Stressful days: Nursing profession require attention to details while serving others and sometimes you are short staffed make you move up and down without much downtime making you overwhelmed and stressed. **
**7. Sad situations: You will witness a sad or tragic situation when carrying out your duties like watching someone die. **
**8. Burn out: **If you’re working in specializations which often loss patients can lead to burn out.
**9. Physical demands: Working as a nurse, you have to lift and transfer patients, lift equipment and boxes during a normal working day leaving the nurse very tired. **
10. Odd hours: You not only work for long hours but also be scheduled for night shifts and other odd hours especially when there is a shortage of nurses.