Registered nurses have received a great deal of training, and nurse practitioners get even more training than that. They earn advanced degrees along with their registered nursing degrees. Nurse practitioners are different from both registered nurses and physicians. However, nurse practitioners are qualified to treat and diagnose severe medical conditions.
A nurse practitioner can become a patient’s primary care provider. These professionals can also order important diagnostic tests and laboratory work, which might be connected to their specialty or area of interest.
Medical Specialties
Some of the professionals who become nurses aren’t interested in becoming specialists. The physicians who become general practitioners often enjoy the fact that they’re able to utilize knowledge from multiple medical specialties.
However, specialists in many fields are often able to earn higher salaries than professionals with a more generalized educational background. Learning a specialty can also give students focus, especially since some of them might be particularly interested in specific medical topics.
Professional nurse practitioners are able to become recognized medical experts. Many of them are board-certified specialists. They can choose to focus on subfields within medicine.
Job Changes
Some registered nurses might be interested in eventually becoming nurse practitioners themselves. They can work as registered nurses for a while and gain some valuable experience at hospitals. From there, some people may decide to earn the professional qualifications that they’ll need to become nurse practitioners. They’ll already have a strong professional background at this point.
The people who pursue this sort of nursing career path will also interact with nurse practitioners in hospitals. They’ll see what the job itself is like.
Other people might decide to earn registered nursing degrees and get their nurse practitioner qualifications immediately afterward. The people who already have hospital experience might be more likely to get hired after graduating. Many nurses today might choose to earn an online MSN. It’s common for people in many fields to earn online degrees now, and they can certainly do so as medical professionals.
Career Paths
Nurses who have thought about becoming physicians at some point may decide to train as nurse practitioners instead. While it’s certainly possible to go from being a nurse to being a doctor, it will still take a long time for nurses to retrain as doctors.
Their educational background would be helpful in a situation like that, but nurses and doctors have still ultimately selected different career paths. The nurses who choose to become physicians are still pursuing a job change.
It may be more practical for a lot of registered nurses to get the educational requirements to become nurse practitioners instead. As nurse practitioners, they’ll already be able to perform many of the same tasks that people associate with physicians.
Some of the students who initially thought about going to medical school might also choose to directly start training as nurse practitioners instead. They’ll start their careers more quickly as a result, and they will graduate with significantly less debt as they begin working in the modern medical field.
