Smart Specialties
Nurse practitioner. Like a physician's assistant, you'll typically provide most of the direct patient care normally handled by a physician. Training is shorter than for physicians, there's less paperwork, and you're likely to work with healthier patients—which means a high success rate.
Nurse anesthetist. With anesthesiologists often earning $300,000 a year, healthcare providers are increasingly looking to nurse anesthetists to lower costs. You're usually the last person to see a patient before surgery and help ensure a pain-free surgery and after-surgery experience. The job can be stressful, but the high demand (especially in rural and inner-city hospitals ), high pay (average is well over $100,000), and high psychological reward make this a smart specialty indeed.
Nurse practitioner. Like a physician's assistant, you'll typically provide most of the direct patient care normally handled by a physician. Training is shorter than for physicians, there's less paperwork, and you're likely to work with healthier patients—which means a high success rate.
Nurse anesthetist. With anesthesiologists often earning $300,000 a year, healthcare providers are increasingly looking to nurse anesthetists to lower costs. You're usually the last person to see a patient before surgery and help ensure a pain-free surgery and after-surgery experience. The job can be stressful, but the high demand (especially in rural and inner-city hospitals ), high pay (average is well over $100,000), and high psychological reward make this a smart specialty indeed.
There's great unmet demand for nurses, and you'll have lots of options. If you want to work directly with patients, you can specialize in everything from neonatology to hospice care. You can work in a hospital, a doctor's office, or a patient's home. Outside of patient care, options range from nurse informatics (helping nurses get access to computerized information) to legal nurse consulting (helping lawyers assess a claim's validity.)
On the downside, many registered nurses must work nights and weekends, and burnout is a factor, especially in medical/surgical wards, and in critical-care specialties such as surgery, oncology, and emergency medicine. There are potential hazards, too: exposure to people with communicable diseases and back injuries from moving patients.
Something to think about: Studies report large numbers of errors by healthcare providers that endanger or kill patients. This is a career for people who are both caring and extremely attentive to detail—even when stressed
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