Registered Nurse Job Description

Perhaps you've heard the term RN and wondered what an RN is. It is a registered nurse. And what is a registered nurse?

An RN, or Registered Nurse, is a regulated, licensed professional who reports to a regulatory agency that sets the guidelines for best practice for each state or province. This regulatory body sets the standards for nurses and regulates what they can legally do and what tasks they can and cannot perform. Based on this set of rules, each work environment defines what the nurses are responsible for in the respective facility.

A nurse is directly responsible for caring for sick people in hospitals, at home, in camps, schools, in industry, and so on. They work on the front lines, giving you medication, changing your bandages, putting on and performing your fluids, and many other tasks. They will monitor your health and liaise with you and the doctor to keep them informed of any improvements or changes in your condition.

Registered Nurse Job Description Also an RN can have many roles and positions in either front-line hands-on nursing or indirect nursing of individuals or groups of people such as teaching or as manager of other nurses in hospital units that will affect their registered nurse salary too to fill.

A registered nurse job description would go too far to explain in detail as they can take on many roles, from frontline work to research, clinic, management, etc. regardless of the role they are in However, they always have one goal in mind: the optimal care of the healthy and the sick and the promotion of health.

The majority of nurses in North America work in hospitals. A nurse's duties in a hospital include: Developing a workable care plan, applying, maintaining and administering medication, cleaning wounds, changing bandages, measuring vital signs such as blood pressure, temperature, breathing and oxygen saturation, and monitoring patients for an improvement or worsening of your condition, the documentation and reporting of these conditions to the attending physician and many other small but important tasks. Every day can change depending on the work environment, so a nurse must be willing to be flexible and think critically, with the patient's health concerns always in the foreground.

Another aspect of the job description of a nurse is the health education of patients and their families. They are responsible for ensuring that when patients leave the hospital, they know how to deal with their illness or injury, how to change bandages, how to eat properly, how to properly take medication or inject themselves and what to do when something goes wrong. Some nurses also work with the public, running clinics for vaccinations, blood donation drives, health checkups, etc.

If you are employed in a large hospital, your responsibilities will change significantly from one department to another. When working in the emergency room, you need to be quick to think critically and to be flexible because every situation that arises in the emergency room is different and requires different skills from you. The work in the maternity ward is of course completely different. You could work in the palliative care unit, cancer unit, or psychiatric ward, and each job will require different skills and attitudes. Often times, nurses will work in a specific field, but if you work part time you may find yourself deployed where there is a need.

The nurse profession is not to be taken lightly. It's a difficult, fast-paced profession where nurses and carers can experience more than their share of tragedy and death. But such a profession is also full of rewards because it saves lives and makes you feel like you are making a difference in so many people's lives.