Staff nurses provide health care services along with other health care practitioners. They perform basic duties that include treating patients, educating patients and the public about various health conditions, and providing advice and emotional support to patients and their family members.
Description
Staff nurse responsibilities may include following:
- Work directly with patients and their families
- Record patients’ health histories and symptoms
- Perform frequent patient evaluations, including monitoring and tracking vital signs
- Assess patients’ conditions and determine when consultation is required
- Perform procedures such as IV placement and phlebotomy
- Help to perform diagnostic tests and analyze results
- Operate medical equipment
- Administer treatment and medications
- Develop the day-to-day nursing care plans both in hospital, and for care after discharge by families and visiting nurses
- Help with patient follow-up and rehabilitation
- Teach patients and their families how to manage their illness or injury, including post-treatment home care needs, diet and exercise programs, and self-administration of medication and physical therapy
Personal qualifications
- Excellent judgment, dependability, conscientious performance
- Close attention to detail, scrupulous recordkeeping
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
- High ethical standards, integrity
- Dependability
- Ability to work cooperatively with others
- The capacity to react to emergencies in a calm and reasoned manner
- Commitment to patient’s welfare
- Caring and sympathetic
- Able to direct or supervise others
- Emotional stability to cope with human suffering, emergencies, and other stresses
- Physical strength and stamina
Licensing
In all states and the District of Columbia, students must graduate from an approved nursing program and pass a national licensing examination, known as the NCLEX-RN, in order to obtain a nursing license. Nurses may be licensed in more than one state, either by examination or by the endorsement of a license issued by another state.
Employment opportunities
- Excellent, ranking among the fastest growing occupations according to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Employment of staff nurses is expected to grow much faster than average (Increase 27 percent or more) through the year 2014
- Nurses who have graduated from a BSN program have better job prospects than RNs who have not earned a baccalaureate degree
Salary
Median annual earnings of nurses in general medical and surgical hospital settings: $53,450 (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, May 2005)
Progression
With experience and good performance, RNs who begin as staff nurses often are promoted to more responsible positions. In management, nurses can advance to assistant head nurse or head nurse and, from there, to assistant director, director, and vice president. Increasingly, management-level nursing positions require a graduate or an advanced degree in nursing or health services administration. They also require leadership, negotiation skills, and good judgment.
Some nurses move into the business side of health care. Employers—including hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and managed care organizations, among others—need RNs for health planning and development, marketing, consulting, policy development, and quality assurance. Other nurses work as college and university faculty or conduct research.
Nurses who have graduated from a BSN program have broader advancement opportunities than RNs who have not earned a baccalaureate degree. A bachelor’s degree often is necessary for administrative positions and is a prerequisite for admission to graduate nursing programs in research, consulting, and teaching, and all four advanced practice nursing specialties—clinical nurse specialists, nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and nurse practitioners.
Getting there: Your degree programs at MCPHS
- BS Nursing - 32-month Accelerated Program (Boston): full-time, accelerated 32-month program for incoming freshmen or transfer students who do not have a prior baccalaureate degree who wish to become registered nurses
- BS Nursing - 16-month Postbaccalaureate Program (Worcester and Manchester): full-time, accelerated 16-month program for applicants who have met all preprofessional course requirements and who hold a prior earned bachelor’s degree and wish to become registered nurses (Manchester campus program launch: 2007)