What Does An Emergency Nurse Practitioner Do?
An emergency nurse practitioner will be found generally in hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers. You may also find an ENP in a nursing home or assisted living facility, jail or prison, or a drug or alcohol rehabilitation center. The duties of an ENP include triaging patients according to level of urgency; examining and diagnosing patients; requesting diagnostic testing and prescribing medication; and writing discharge instructions, admission paperwork and referrals to specialists based on the patient’s needs. These duties are generally carried out under the supervision of a physician in that he or she will sign off on the decisions of the ENP, but most responsibilities are carried out with authority and autonomy. In the course of a work day, an ENP may see many patients or just a few, in age groups ranging from infants to geriatric patients.
Emergency Nurse Practitioner Education
A nurse practitioner is a registered nurse with an advanced degree in nursing. This time and financial investment involved in achieving this advanced education is worthwhile for those seeking a better salary, greater job autonomy, and greater job security. A nurse practitioner is licensed to perform many of the responsibilities once limited to physicians. Most advanced practice nurses will choose from a wide range of available Nurse Practitioner Specialties, and focus their upper level class work in that direction, as well as the topic of their thesis and their clinical experience hours. An adult nurse practitioner, for example, works with adult patients, possibly specializing in disease management, wellness maintenance, or pathophysiology. If you are currently employed as a registered nurse and hold a bachelor’s degree in nursing, you are eligible to obtain your master’s degree via online classes; of course, you may opt for a traditional classroom setting as well. If you are a registered nurse with a degree in another subject or without a bachelor’s degree, you will want to apply for a bridge program, which will help you complete you prerequisites for a master’s degree as part of your overall graduate program. The first portion of your educational program will include general nursing classes, and later you will be able to gear your education toward emergency medicine. These classes will also seem general; as an ENP, you will see patients of all ages with a wide range of injuries and maladies. There will be a portion of your training that will be based on trauma. Once your classes have been completed, you will be required to complete multiple periods of practical supervised experience. If your area of specialty will be emergency medicine, you will likely complete these in emergency departments or urgent care centers. It may be advisable that you work in a children’s hospital, followed by a general emergency department, and then in an area that will expose you to geriatric medicine. This will give you a more rounded array of experience overall and give you a more marketable set of skills. Once you have completed your practical experience requirements, you will be ready to sit for your certification exam. Once you pass this, you will be a certified nurse practitioner with a specialization in emergency medicine. This will give you the opportunity to diagnose, treat, and make recommendations to your patients, much like a physician would, giving you more autonomy than you enjoyed as a registered nurse.
The Job Outlook For Emergency Nurse Practitioners
There has been a sharp increase in the number of emergency nurse practitioners over the past ten years, and with medical centers like the Mayo Clinic building their teams of emergency personnel around their ENP’s, you can expect those numbers to continue to go up in the next ten years. This equates to more than adequate availability of jobs for emergency nurse practitioners looking for work in their fields, as well as strong job security. The salary range for these nursing professionals is listed in three levels at salarygenius.com, a site dedicated to gathering and interpreting data across the wide field of practice nursing. They cite a beginning salary for an emergency nurse practitioner as about $69,840, or about $32 per hour. Salaries, of course, vary by location and by the job site. Once an emergency nurse practitioner has been working in the field for a while and can bring extensive experience to the table, he or she is able to demand a higher salary, and on average, the position tops out around $106,000. It is important to keep in mind that private hospitals and urgent care centers that see primarily private pay patients will pay better than a public health practice or a not for profit medical center. Other factors that will affect your salary will be the level of trauma generally seen by the facility where you are employed, expected census based on past years, and the ratio of insured to uninsured patients in the community as a whole.