The Life of a Nurse Practitioner Essay Example

📌Category: Health, Life, Nursing
📌Words: 713
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 22 March 2022

The life of a nurse practitioner isn't always the enjoyable work people could assume. The stress load, hours outside of work along with the risks that come with it every day. This career isn't the route for everyone, you have to be passionate about pursuing it. Working hours from 8:00 AM-5:00 PM along with working many extra outside hours. This all starts with the night before preparing charts for patients. Starting your workday seeing patients throughout the day, spending time catching up on tasks such as patients' labs, phone calls, and notes. My sister sees a lot of immunocompromised patients, chemo patients, and having to wear a mask at all times. Working with a physician and two nurses as her team, seeing around 10 patients a daily. Completing the individual's notes and essentially following up on labs ordered, patient callbacks, and follow-ups. She works in handling chemo side effects management. This, to her, provides a sense of purpose and accomplishment and can make a pretty positive impact on the patients during a trying time in a major way to the patients. Describing her job as very stressful yet rewarding, with a lot of work after hours and not being able to spend time at home relaxing. This has become a struggle having two kids at home and not being able to give full attention to. Bringing the work home with her has become a psychosocial stressor to her simply due to her not being able to escape work. Taking notes and catching up on charts even after she leaves has taken a toll on her. 

She has various biohazards that she works with, such as removing port needles, giving injections, and dealing with blood. She is required to wear a set PPE daily to provide these tasks. She is required to wear a mask, face shield, and gloves. During covid times she has had to wear a lot more than just a mask for the protection of the patient such as full body suits for the chemo patients at high risk. Some of her other colleagues are required to wear much more when giving chemotherapy treatment; such as a full-body suit, face shield, and gloves. If the proper PPE is not worn, she could face danger from needle sticks, getting sick from patients that come in when ill, and exposure to chemotherapy. They have a procedure of who to call and where they go and what needs to be done based on the incident that could happen. These are major points that play into the protection of her job and help her from not getting exposed to outside dangers. Even patients coming in ill could spread and get through the office and affect people doing chemotherapy and then it becomes communicable to everyone there. At her workplace, she is required to be vaccinated against the flu and covid. They are required to wear proper PPE daily. Their work office always makes sure it's available and can be grabbed and taken on the go. With the correct training and skills required none of these should occur but incidents can happen and wearing the proper PPE at all times can keep you out of harm's way. In a rare case, she told me that someone she works with has a peanut allergy and a patient brought a peanut-based substance into the chemo suite where they were about to have chemotherapy and a nurse went into anaphylactic shock from an allergic reaction. Even at a place, you'd least expect having something like that happen from outside variables. 

Someone going into this field should understand that you'll need to be patient and actually listen to mentors and take what they have to say into consideration. Listening to your patients and colleagues trying to absorb any information and not being afraid to ask questions. There are a lot of outside psychosocial stressors that can become overwhelming if you don't ask questions and get the help you need. A substitute for what policies they have now, she would change is; providing adequate staff to protect each other and not having the feeling of rushing around, and instead of taking their time with each of the individuals, and putting more time into each person. Changing the protocol to have more time during the work hour to make charts, having less patient volume, and focusing more on the individual patient than the outside stress of doing all the notes and charts outside of work. Having the administration help their employees out by making their life easier and enforcing administrative control to changing policies to benefit the majority than the lesser population.

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