Should I become a nurse?
Nursing is an exciting and rewarding career, but it’s also a challenging one. That’s why it’s important to consider whether you should become a nurse before you apply. There are many factors to consider, including which qualities make a good nurse, what your career could look like, and what you’ll need to do to become a nurse.
What does a nurse do?
Nursing offers a unique range of opportunities to improve the lives of others, whether that’s in hospitals, at home or in communities. Nurses use new technologies to offer treatments and other skills, such as listening, to show empathy and support.
What a nurse does each day is usually influenced by their specialism and setting. For example, a nurse working in a hospital ward might assess a patient’s condition, administer medications, and provide emotional support for the patient and their family.
It’s an incredibly diverse role that could involve nursing newborns back to health, saving lives in A&E, helping people overcome mental barriers, or supporting people with learning difficulties.
In fact, there are many nursing specialities and a range of settings you could work within. If you want to change careers and become a nurse, you'll open the door to a range of healthcare-related jobs, whether that’s retraining as a health visitor, becoming a nursing trainer, progressing medical research, or working as a medical sales representative, to name just a handful of examples.
What makes a good nurse?
Florence Nightingale is the classic embodiment of the qualities a nurse should have. She was exceptionally caring, famous for her compassion towards individuals in very difficult circumstances, and skilled in connecting with patients within their environment. She was also known for her intellect, especially her understanding of what needed to be done and why. She was able to spot patterns in diseases and identify the changing needs of populations and individuals.
When you become a nurse, you’ll get to work flexibly with a range of patients, sometimes in highly stressful scenarios. It may be obvious that a good nurse needs to be kind and caring with patients and able to build a good rapport with all different types of people. However, it’s equally as important that you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it — and consider if there are any other ways to approach an issue or a problem.
The skills you’ll need to be a good nurse include:
- Listening and communication
- Caring
- Sound judgement
- Prioritisation
- Flexibility
- Observation
- Teaching and advising
- Counselling
The qualities of a good nurse are best reflected in the six NHS values.
These are:
- Working together for patients. This means always putting the patient first in everything you do as a nurse.
- Respect and dignity. You’ll value every person as an individual, including a patient’s family or carer and your colleagues. You’ll respect their beliefs, aspirations, and life commitments while working to understand their priorities, needs, abilities, and limits.
- Commitment to quality of care. Nurses should insist on quality and strive to deliver the basics of quality care right every time.
- Compassion. It’s central to the care you’ll provide as a nurse, which means you should respond with humanity and kindness to each person’s pain, distress, anxiety or need.
- Improving lives. You should always strive to improve not just each person’s experience with the NHS but also their health and wellbeing.
- Everyone counts. You’ll maximise your nursing resources to benefit the whole community. No one will be excluded, discriminated against or left behind.
Should you become a nurse?
There are many exciting reasons to become a nurse. For example, you have the opportunity to support people through very important times in their lives. Nurses can transform a patient’s experience and help make a difficult time as positive as possible.
Nursing can be an expansive career that offers plenty of opportunities to grow or diversify your experience. With so many different roles available, you could have ten careers in one.
It’s an evolving field, and the role of a nurse is changing over time. The way you’re able to support patients is expanding and opening up more opportunities for professional development.
However, it’s important to also consider the challenging nature of nursing, as it’s not suited to everyone.
You’ll be focused on the individual patient and their family, often during a time of distress, which can be emotionally difficult. And at times, you may find nursing to be emotionally draining. This can be compounded by long working hours and heavy workloads, which can be stressful and overwhelming. Plus, you’ll be on your feet a lot, so you may feel physically exhausted as well.
But if you feel you have something to offer the nursing profession and you have a natural inclination to care for others, then it’s worth exploring if nursing is right for you.
What type of nurse should you be?
You need to choose which type of nurse you want to become at the very start of your career because you’ll have to apply for the relevant degree. You’ll typically choose between becoming an adult, children’s or mental health nurse, though some programmes offer combined registration.
But with a huge variety of nursing specialties available to you, you can find roles that offer a blend of specialisms or let you work in a range of settings. For example, as a registered adult nurse, you could go on to work as an A&E nurse and be the first point of contact for emergency patients or become an integral part of the primary care team at a GP surgery.
Your career as a registered mental health nurse could be just as varied. You could specialise in addiction or substance misuse or work with patients in the criminal justice system as a forensic mental health nurse.
If you become a registered children’s nurse, you could focus on neonatal care or work with child cancer patients, for example.
You can also move between disciplines, with conversion courses allowing you to transfer to another type of nursing. You can also retrain for a related role, such as becoming a specialist community public health nurse and working as a school nurse or health visitor.
If you’re unsure about what type of nurse you should become, it may help to think about where you’d like to be in five or 10 years time and work out what type of nursing will allow you to do that.
Should you study nursing?
If you want to become a nurse, you’ll need to study a nursing degree. It’s not possible to become a registered nurse without one, though you could complete an apprenticeship instead of a standard university course.
You can find undergraduate nursing degrees with registration as either an adult, children’s, mental health or learning disabilities nurse.
If you’ve already got a degree, you may be able to take a postgraduate nursing degree that will also give you NMC registration for the same types of nursing. It’s also possible to get dual registration at the postgraduate level, depending on where you study.
When you’re browsing nursing degrees, make sure you look for one that offers registration in your chosen field. This is particularly important if you want to choose a less popular field, such as learning disabilities nursing, as there are fewer universities that offer this.
The minimum nursing qualifications you’ll need to become a registered nurse is a degree and registration with the Nursing & Midwifery Council. As your career progresses, you may need to undertake more study to specialise further.