Job Overview In every hospital, there is always an emergency department, as the first department of contact of any of the patients that will be confined to wards or private rooms. This is the initial treatment ward where patients will first be assessed and given an emergency first aid. All the types of healthcare professionals in a regular ward are also present in the emergency unit. There are doctors, pharmacist, triage officers as well as nurses on duty, to help these patients out of their critical condition. The nurses in this emergency team is called the emergency nurses. As highly skilled workers in direct patient care, they incorporate all the specialties of nursing in one. They are required to take care of broad range of patient's ages, from infancy to old age, and undertake a broad spectrum of nursing and medical care.
Education Knowledge and Trainings Required
Emergency nurses are registered nurses. The minimum college requirement to become one is a possession of a bachelor's degree in Nursing, or an associates' degree in Nursing, plus a significant number of on the job training or professional work experience embedded in the curriculum. A license is required in all of the states, and can be obtained after passing a licensure examination administered by the American Nursing Association, or any authority running the field. To be spefically qualified as emergency nurses, they should apply for short courses and certification courses, as well as post graduate masteral degree in Emergency Nursing, offered in any of the nursing colleges or within the hospital of employment itself.
Skills and Abilities
Presence of mind as well as the nursing expertise are needed in emergency room nursing. Being time conscious and punctual are qualities that these types of nurses are proud of. These are needed as cases may be life threatening, and that loss of lives may be possible in seconds, should interventions get delayed. Collaborative skills, communication skill, recording and reporting are also a must so as to relay results and messages to the patients themselves, emergency team and the relatives of the patients.
Duties
As many would say, emergency nursing is the most challenging area of nursing. Their main duty is to immediately or timely provide highly skilled emergency first aid, and medical care of the patients in need. It is a separate nursing specialty that incorporates almost all types of nursing specialty such that they are expected to attend to the emergent needs of the neonates in distress, pregnant woman on labor, cancer patient in sever pain, motor vehicular accident orthopedic case patients, elderly in cardiac arrest, to name a few examples. They focus on the emergency care though.
This include range of nursing interventions from giving general nursing care to simple cases like influenza, to performing life saving procedures, e.g. intubation to severely respiratory distressed patients. The main goal of their goal it to make the patients stable so as to be transferred to the regular ward or the intensive care unit. All the interventions that are being done by these nurses come from the careful assessment and evaluation of the condition, as well as continuous monitoring.
Job Outlook and Earnings
The job outlook for nurses in general is good. It is expected that the growth of employment will be increasingly stable until the year of 2014, not only in the Unites States, but also in different parts of the globe, more specifically, in the Australian continent, Europe, as well as in the Middle East. The median salary for the Emergency nurses is around 53,000 U.S. dollars on a yearly basis. The range of salary starts off from 44,000 to 65,000 U.S. dollars per annum.
Paula Hiz is a researcher and a human resource specialist who helps newly graduates, job applicants and post graduate professionals be aware of their job opportunities and available trainings for skills and practice upgrading.