To want to change courses to nursing?

[nursesz]

I'm currently in my first year studying Speech and Language Therapy. I was torn between nursing or SALT but went with SALT because you can work in a range of settings (hospitals, schools, clinics), you have the option to work privately and the hours are more friendly (9-5) than nursing.

I would say I'm enjoying most of my course, and I could probably just put my head down and see it through. But I'm really regretting not doing nursing. I feel like whilst SALT involves helping patients, nursing involves a lot more care and time with patients. I have a science background too and nursing is a lot more medical/biology-based than SALT. SALT has lots of elements that I'm struggling with like phonology and linguistics.

I really don't know what to do. I feel like I'll regret never being a nurse in a way I'd not regret never being a SALT. But I feel like I'd regret not picking the career with the better work-life balance. I don't know

I have family members who are SALTs. I would say the work is rewarding but sometimes underappreciated. Also, can be difficult to get the right job unless you are flexible on area. But work/life balance good and opportunities to work privately if you are motivated to do so. Nursing - you will never be out of a job. Although it's probably a tougher job, don't live with regret.

I'm a hospital OT with two adult children who work in the NHS too. Only thing I'd say about SALT is that there are very few posts, the ones within the acute hospital seem to be all to do with swallow. But as a nurse there is a wide variety of posts to chose from and plenty of opportunities for career progression or part time work.

In my memory a lot of the most rewarding parts of nursing are delegated to healthcare support workers now and even they can be too rushed to be able to do it as they'd wish. There are certainly exceptions like ICU and specialist nursing but on many wards I saw a typical nursing shift involved receive handover, drug rounds, write notes, prepare for next handover and ensure the support workers did everything required, then hope the next shift's nurse turns up or you can't leave. Basically underpaid managers/paperworkers whose PIN is always on the line, that are also the first leaders on scene in a medical emergency until the crash team arrive. I hope some nurses will turn up to reassure and inspire but personally I would think SALT could be more rewarding. And if not, there will always be opportunities to retrain as a nurse later, maybe some time in the future when nurses are better paid and the nhs is better funded. Maybe get a part time/bank healthcare support role around your studies if you want to find out more about nursing. I found those roles really rewarding, though terribly paid.

Not just me then: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4987557-how-much-caring-do-nurses-actually-do-nowadays

There's lots od specialities within nursing that have better work-life balance hours. Some kinds of nursing roles are very paperwork focused and may not involve a great deal of patient contact time, others are very much patient-focused. A specialist oncology nurse is an example of a role you might thrive in - chemotherapy sessions are generally only scheduled between 8am to 6pm monday to friday and the nurses's role is very hands-on and patient-focused albeit with a lot of skilled and complex tasks to be done (e.g. calculating doses where the prescription depends on the patient's weight and other metrics taken on the day of treatment)

I really wouldn't mind the paperwork element, I feel like the shift in nursing makes the role more interesting to me as I think I'd much rather be doing medication rounds than just strictly personal care for the entire shift.

I feel like I'm already feeling frustrated by the narrow scope of SALT practice, we're learning about the same kinds of diseases again and again albeit from different angles and in greater depth. I like nursing because I would get a broad understanding of different diseases but still have the option to narrow down on a certain area (like oncology) if I wanted to.

There's also so much more to SALT than I realised, with phonetics and linguistics. They don't come naturally to me, and I find them really dull.

At the same time I'm conscious that it could just be 'the grass is greener', as I'm bogged down with exams and assignments and it's cold and miserable January so maybe I'm just looking for an escape

I'm a SALT - qualified about a year and a half.

Firstly - phonetics makes EVERYONE'S brain hurt. Linguistics makes most people's brains hurt as well (I did better than most because I did lots of Latin at school and had a good grasp of more grammar than was the norm in our cohort). I think every single person in my course cohort had at least one phonetics-induced meltdown over the course of the first year.

Lots of the first year content I found really quite boring (I did the three year degree) - lots of psychology and child development and not much of the interesting stuff... second year and third year where we got the interesting stuff about various diagnoses, neurology and the like were so much more interesting to me... and more relevant to be fair since by then I had decided I didn't want to go into paeds - the idea of hours in clinic with a ridiculous caseload I don't get to build a relationship with was just hell to me.

I work in adult LD community and I love it - lots of working with different professions, and my caseload is of a level that I can build up good relationships with people - and when I go into day services I usually get greeted (in varying forms) by about half the room I've seen before for various things. Get the medical aspect from things like dysphagia work (which again was something we really didn't cover at all until second year) and going to VFs and the like, and then I enjoy really getting to understand and unpick someone's communication and how that's demonstrated in their behaviour. Other people I know love things like work in stroke because of having to have some understanding of neurology for it, and the medicalised nature of that kind of work, another I qualified with works with Deaf children, one is working within the criminal justice system and in police stations, another in mental health etc... so many really different areas that we've gone into.

Basically first year in particular is so massively massively generalised and covering all the basic building blocks of how language functions that it really doesn't give you much of a feeling at all about how the final job can be in different areas.

I would say if you feeling like this change whilst you can ! I’m currently a 3rd year student paramedic and a new mum to a beautiful baby so after having time off away from uni and re starting my placements on the ambulance I’m hating it. I didn’t enjoy my 1st year thought about nursing but plodded on to my 2nd year and I did quite enjoy my 2nd year however now I’m in 3rd year again and my hearts just not in it I wish I listened to my gut instinct in year 1 of going to do my nursing instead. Now sfe is not an option to train to be a nurse via uni and sfe so I’m looking at maybe a nursing associate apprenticeship it’s a pay cut of what a paramedic would be but I hopefully will be happier xx