What is Working As A Nurse Practitioner Like?

Qualifying as a nurse practitioner when you are currently an RN is now easier than ever before due to the wide availability of good quality family NP online programs from well respected universities and nursing schools, so you can fit your studies around your current nursing work or study from home full-time.

If you are thinking about making 2021 the year you begin training to advance your career from RN to FNP, then you may be wondering what the job is like, and what kind of differences you can expect to see as you begin working as a nurse practitioner after your RN experience. Here we take a look at the role of an FNP, and what working as one is like:

Providing Care Throughout the Full Life of Patients

One of the reasons why healthcare professionals who have qualified as nurse practitioners are so crucial in the modern healthcare landscape is that they are able to provide important primary care to patients throughout the human lifecycle. This means that they can play a big role in taking care of families or can work as specialists in a particular age group or type of care – for instance, palliative care, women’s reproductive health, and pediatrics. Nurse practitioners can effectively do a lot of the work of primary care physicians, and in many ways fill the huge gap created by the lack of primary care doctors in many areas.

A Leadership Role

One of the big differences between an RN and an NP is that nurse practitioners can often have a more leadership related role or may even run their own practices in some cases. While nurses are usually focused only on patient care, the NP role is more varied in the people the NP has to form good relationships with, and areas of leadership such as raising the standards of care offered in your facility or introducing new innovative approaches become important. This allows an NP to have a role in improving healthcare and bettering lives in their local community on a broader scale, as well as working with individual patients to help them.

A Vital Healthcare Role

The role of the nurse practitioner is one of the most in-demand in healthcare, and in some areas, particularly rural areas where large hospitals are not easily accessible to most people, the nurse practitioner is the key contact point for many people with the healthcare they need. As you might expect for such a highly sought-after role and one that demands a high level of skill, training, and professionalism, nurse practitioners can be highly paid, with the pay range for the average NP exceeding $100k per annum.

If you are looking for a new challenge in your nursing career where you can become more involved with healthcare leadership and be even more essential to your patients, then looking into studying to become a family nurse practitioner could definitely be the right next move for you.