Do You Want to Become a Nurse Or Do You Want to Become a Doctor? - What is the Difference Anyway?
If you want to become a nurse you may have already heard this comment from others:
"Why don't you go to school for a few more years and become a doctor?"
Sadly this comment is directed at a lot of nursing students or even high school students preparing for their chosen career in health care.
The questions itself suggests that the asker does not understand the definition of nursing or how the nursing profession and the medical profession differ.
There is a much larger difference between nursing practice and medical practice than the number of years spent in post secondary education.
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Although many people do view nurses as "junior doctors" or even as the "doctor's assistant" or worse yet the "doctor's handmaiden" these references to the nursing profession are very dated and do not reflect the reality of nursing in Canadian health care system today.
Nursing practice and medical practice share a common knowledge base but approach their professional practice from different perspectives.
If you think you want to become a doctor you should know that doctors give their attention first to the patient's diagnosis.
The diagnosis provides the direction for the medical care plan. If a patient is not yet diagnosed a physician does tests and diagnostic studies to rule out all the possible things that might be wrong and get to the specific diagnosis. This is called "ruling out".
A doctor starts with identifying a number of things that might be wrong and then conducts tests and examinations to rule out all the possibilities until there is only one diagnosis that is plausible from the test results and the patient' symptoms.
In order to do this, doctors must spend a lot of time with information such as test results, health care records, consult reports from other doctors, and even textbooks, journals and other reference material.
If you think you want to become a nurse you should know that nursing practice is wholly concerned with the response of the client.
Nurses seek to gather more and more information about a client in order to better understand the interaction of the physical, environmental, social, and emotional factors contributing to the client's response.
The patient's diagnosis is information that informs the nurse but is not necessarily the most important information that the nurse needs in order to care for the client.
In order to provide care, the nurse needs to spend a lot of time with the patient and the patient's family gathering information about the patient's own individual needs and how the patient is responding to the health challenge they are experiencing.
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A doctor focuses on the diagnosis that the patient has. A nurse focuses on the patient that has a diagnosis.
Nurses also provide nursing to people who have no medical diagnosis because health promotion is a huge part of any nursing practice.
So what is the bottom line in choosing between becoming a nurse and becoming a doctor?
Think of it this way...
You will want to become a doctor if you prefer to spend most of your time with information. You will want to become a nurse if you prefer to spend most of your time with people.
