Are there any nurses or midwives here? Considering it as a career...

[WatchingWithDisinterest]

I got into Midwifery last year. I was so incredibly passionate about it but didn't take up my place due to losing a baby girl before I was starting. I was in a very bad place and although I didn't feel phased by dealing with other pregnancies and a bit of newborn, I couldn't get passed the grief of day to day life, so a university degree just wasn't doable. Although I did continue to work as a client care co-ordinator at an abortion clinic, offering consultation for pregnant women and asking why they were ending the pregnancy, how are they, are they safe at home. Etc etc. I felt proud that I was still able to offer the same care despite my situation at the time and didn't bat an eyelid.

I am now in a much better place BUT I am considering nursing as an alternative. Either adult or paediatric. I'm unsure. I have been told paediatric can be a 'nicer' job than adult nursing? And I don't mean that in regards to being around smaller people. My child nursing friends keep telling me to AVOID adult nursing. I wonder why?

I have considered nursing because I love the care aspect of the job, despite the ever demanding work load and not being able to provide the time and care I'd want to - I look at it as providing the very best care I can regardless, by doing my absolute best regardless with what I can do.

Although not too common, there are definitely nursing 9-5 jobs around, or more predictable shift patterns around if you're interested and can get hold of one after being a nurse for a while. However, the same is never true for Midwifery. Its shift base forever and even community isn't predictable and leaves you on call etc. I've heard you can do bank but how reliable is it really?

ANY words of wisdom or advice would be warmly welcomed. Thank you x

Hi OP. I work in healthcare (therapies) but my daughter works in adult nursing. Whilst nursing is a vocation, it is not for the faint hearted, long hours and little/none/dreadful support from managers leave you feeling very demoralised.

My DD is very lucky, she works in London in a specialist hospital, so by definition, has a smaller ratio of nurse to patient. That said, she has been run ragged (averages around 20,000 steps per day) but luckily the ward/s are supportive, but I think that's hugely due to the hospital itself.

She's now an 'educator' and works 8-4 Monday to Friday, she has only been there 4 years.

To do 9-5 is more of a CNS role. I think a nursing background opens doors, and you'll never be out of work.

I work in the community, some of our district nurses are ONLY bank!

Good luck

I'm sorry for your loss OP

Thank you

I have two more distant friends who are adult nurses and they both work shifts, one FT and the other 1 day a week with Bank work to top up when she wants.

The other 3 nursing friends are child nurses and shift based, one transport based and the other community based, 9 to 4. Monday to Thursday. She never does any overtime

Oh and I know a lot of midwives, about 10. Everyone left to provide abortion care and SCREAM DO NOT GO INTO MIDWIFERY.

To be honest nursing and midwifery is more about safety critical assessment and delivering procedures than caring. It’s an endless round of assessing very sick or needy patients and a long list of tasks such as IV medications/ life saving interventions / one birth to the next (depending which specialty you go into), endless paperwork, supervising HCAs, junior doctors, nursing students and so on. If you work in a lower dependency area you have more patients so you’re still busy.

You’re treated as the lowest of all professions (most nurses are band 5 and I rarely see an AHP on less than band 6, normally band 7-8) and lorded over by a corporate nursing team of overpaid, clipboard types who judge the efectiveness of your area by a number of crude measures. If you can bear working in that environment and speed through masters degrees and sister-matron jobs then corporate nursing is a low stress highly paid job. There are specialist more autonomous clinical jobs but the caseloads are horrific.

Having said that expert, highly skilled, caring nurses and midwives are invaluable to patients and the most safety critical profession in a hospital. It’s just a shame that the rest of the hierarchy don’t value them.

I wouldn’t do it again and nor would I do medicine as most medics are the unhappiest people I know. I wouldn’t discourage someone from being an AHP. Pharmacy, OT, Physios are all busy but better paid and allowed to work in the self directed, autonomous manner that you would expect in a professional role. While Nurses are patronised and infantlised.

I would say that with paediatric nursing there are far fewer opportunities for non-shift work than adult nursing. Children's community nursing tends to be quite small teams compared to district nursing etc. But the paeds nurses I know love their jobs. Ratios tend to be better than adult nursing.

I would say adult nursing opens more doors e.g. practice nursing, conversion to midwifery down the line, lots of different outpatient specialities (e.g. dermatology, anti coag, infection control, diabetes, oncology etc etc) if you don't want to be on the wards and do shift work forever.

Good luck with your decision.

Midwifery is moving towards a continuity of care model. So investigate that and see whether you think it would fit into your lifestyle. You’d basically caseload a group of women and provide most of their care. There is more flexibility in when you provide antenatal and postnatal care but also more on calls for the birth.

Nursing has more opportunities after qualification. If you don’t like one area you can move somewhere else. Ward jobs, clinic jobs, practice nurse, speciality jobs.

There are some speciality jobs in midwifery which are 9-5, so safeguarding, breastfeeding, substance misuse, screening, etc. But just due to the lower numbers of these jobs it’s harder to get one.

Nursing isn’t a 9-5 thing. There are various clinic positions but apart from that it’s 12 hour long days shift patterns that cover weekends , nights and public holidays, including Christmas Day. It’s 3/4 years of training too. It’s hard and demanding but very rewarding. In my opinion it’s not just a “job” , it’s something you really want to do.

I know nursing isn't a 9-5 thing in general. Just a shame it can't be 7-8 but reliable and predictable in shift pattern

It can be reliable shift patterns. I am an A&E nurse and I work fixed shifts which I requested at interview. I know of lots of nurses who have had children who do the same.

I absolutely love my job, but of course it is high pressured at times. The training was really tough because ime the universities and placement areas are not willing to make concessions for parents regarding childcare etc. But it is doable - about half the people on my course had children, some very young and many like me did not have support from family. Placements tend to be a max of 9 weeks at a time so you just stagger through until the next one!

I work with OTs and physios in the community, I can categorically say in MY team they are not run ragged, or stressed in the true sense of the word. However, it is a 'run of the mill' job, not for the ambitious really, like most community jobs, it suits a lifestyle which is generally someone older/has younger children.

OT is a nice profession, I encouraged my daughter to do this instead of nursing, she didn't listenthey don't do shifts (generally) and work (generally) M-F.

Oh and I second what a PP said about nurses being undervalued, they are consistently saving the arses of junior (and some more senior) doctors. Even HCAs are undervalued, so much experience in many cases.

I love my job, every day is different. I work as a specialist nurse practitioner now but obviously had to do my time as a ward nurse to get to this role. There’s so much scope for additional training in nursing, I work to the level of a doctor now and have completed further university courses all funded by work so I can prescribe and examine patients. Working as a staff nurse on the wards can be really challenging, it’s not just the patients, it’s the relatives and the management too, the working Xmas and bank holidays, not always getting the annual leave you want, night shifts and weekends. You have to be easy going and flexible if you want a career in nursing. I was lucky I was 21 when I qualified and had no ties but I saw my colleagues struggle with shift work and childcare. I agree with PPs we are totally taken for granted and not appreciated especially by management but I don’t do the job for the thanks, I do it because I genuinely enjoy it.

Have you thought about theatres? I'm an anaesthetic nurse but I do the same role as ODPs who are the same grade as nurses but mainly work in theatres.

We work all over the hospital on the resus team, and in theatres with adults and children, and obstetrics is a big part of our role. I love the variety it brings and the hours are generally family friendly. Nights and weekend work is limited. Most shifts are 8-6.

There's actually a massive shortage of anaesthetic practitioners and so there are lots of ODP apprenticeships available at the moment.

I'm a mental health nurse. I love everything about all the different posts I've had. Despite all the negatives (and people have already detailed them) there is a lot of advantage. I have always worked in the community 9/5, 7.30/3.30 as suited me. Lots of autonomy, good training opportunities, plenty of band 6 posts available (I was band 6 in 10 months of qualifying) and most importantly a genuine opportunity to make a difference. You don't go into nursing to make a million, but for me, it's given wonderful work life balance and a decent wage in accordance. Not everyone's career is a horror story. Best decision I ever made was to retrain as a nurse

I'm a paediatric nurse. Been qualified 16 years.
It's the best job ever. I love it. It's not at all depressing as kids deal with things much better than adults do. It's great at making you think outside the box. I.e, how are you going to get this child to sit still and have blood test. It's less pressured than adult nursing. And lovely to see frequent flyers grow up. (Though it makes me feel very old)
Lots of cute babies to cuddle. But it is terrible for the waistline as we get loads of chocolates and biscuits.

We really do make a difference to families and there is definitely still time for caring.

Sorry for your loss OP

Do you have children, a family or want to travel? I'm a nurse but trained abroad. I've worked in 3 countries through my nursing and still love it 20yrs on. When I moved to London, I joined an agency and was never out of work. You do need to get experience before an agency will take you, but it can certainly open doors and gives you far more experience of various areas outside just wards.

In 10yrs with the agency, I worked in A&E (my initial main area anyways), practice nursing, community nursing, private clinics and GP settings, abortion clinic, flu vaccine nurse, clinical research and much more. I do agree that there are far more opportunites for an adult trained nurse, and potentially more chance to get into something outside the NHS. As an adult nurse, you might get the option to work with children in A&E, theatres, as a school nurse etc.

I went to a health spa in the countryside and there was a nurse working there. If worksites are over a certain size, they need to have (I think) an occupational health and safety officer onsite. There are nurses on filmsets and festivals for first aid, medical centres in airports, private, universities and hospitals based research studies, training posts, first aider/CPR training roles, aesthetic nursing, paramedic and 111 call handler roles plus SO much more. The vast majority of the above roles are not ward based either.

Another option might be osteopathy. Training can be part or full time, but once completed, you can have you own buisiness and work your own hours.

I trained as a MH nurse, but now work in a team that do CBT. I work 'loosely' 9-5, my manager is really flexible and as long as I do my hours I can do them anytime between 8am and 8pm, I also work from home several days a week. This works for me as my DD is 4 and I get to do the school run and be around for her, and then write a few notes up in the evening once she's in bed. I would say, that MH nursing has more scope for working 9-5 as there's more community and therapy teams and under my health board at least, there's as much bigger scope for band 6 jobs as most non ward jobs are band 6. In my area at least, MH nurses progress to band 6 roles a lot quicker then than the adult nurses, just because there's so many more of the roles.

Look at Occupational Therapy too

I am a paediatric nurse, and I get the impression that it is 'better' than adult nursing in terms of the nurse:patient ratio etc and having some (still not enough) time to care for and spend with the patients. I couldn't do adult nursing, but I like working with children and their families. I love my job most of the time. Yes, the shifts are hard to combine with a family life, but I do have colleagues who have returned from maternity leave in the past year or so who do set shifts as a flexible working agreement to make this easier, so it is possible. I know people who have moved on from the ward to more 9-5ish jobs in outpatients, community nursing, schools, becoming a health visitor, various CNS roles, day surgery units etc.
I don't know any midwives to compare, but it is 20 years since I started my nursing degree, and there are days when I feel like nursing is breaking me but that is balanced out by the days that I love the job and feel like we have made a real difference to people.

I'm an adult nurse. Adult nursing is harrowing, I would recommend it if you want a job that gives you nightmares and mental illness.

If you want a nice job where you help people, maybe occupational therapy, speech and language, physio or dietetics if your grades and subjects are competitive.

I second a pp re looking into Occupational Therapy. I trained as a nurse over a decade ago, worked shifts on a ward for a few years but couldn't ever get over the 'fear' factor and I've seen things that'll stay with me for the rest of my life. Plus they weren't very flexible wrt childcare.
Have worked as an OT assistant for 8 years and am now going to train as an OT, I start my course next week. I dont expect it to be a walk in the park but having experienced life as a nurse I doubt it will be anywhere near as stressful!

I’m an adult nurse.
Given the opportunity to train again, I’m not sure I would choose nursing. It’s one of those jobs where once you’re in it it’s really hard to change careers.
I work in general practice, three days a week 9-5:30. I’ve never worked the wards, I utterly hated ward work when I was training as I dislike the unpredictability of them.
Not sure if I will carry on with nursing to be honest, there are aspects of it that I love and I can make a really difference to peoples lives but it takes a lot out of you.

If you can maintain very low expectations then nursing can be okay. You'll never be unemployed and the pay can be okay.

However, you usually have to try and slot the actual care in around the bureaucracy and paperwork. You get endless grief from managers and even more from relatives. Colleagues can be frustrating to deal with and some are downright dangerous. Some relatives can be downright treacherous.

You spend most of your shift trying to cover your arse and picking up tasks lazy colleagues have left. If you make a mistake, it's that that they'll focus on, not all your previous hard work. You'll get dragged into other people's mistakes as well.

There's also endless patronising 'training' to be done. You sometimes get sexually harassed and thumped too.

If job security is your main concern and you have the hide and constitution of a rhino, then go for it by all means.