Why Nursing Is A Excellent Career For Tech-Lovers

When you think of careers that allow you to work with tech, nursing might not be the first one you think of.

17:46 10 March 2020

However, nursing offers plenty of opportunities for passionate techies to indulge their passion. It is a career path worth considering.

An In-Demand Career With Excellent Prospects

The notion that only women should be nurses or that this is a profession exclusively for women and men of a certain persuasion is now hopelessly outdated. However, it is certainly true that nursing has always offered an excellent career path for women, and continues to do so today. Nursing is one of the relatively few professions in which women can expect to rise to the highest echelons.

Men who wish to work as nurses should not be deterred from doing so. Both men and women will find the modern nursing profession a welcoming and inclusive environment filled with opportunities. But it is a sad and unavoidable fact that in most modern industries, men are significantly more likely to make it to the top than women. Nursing turns this paradigm on its head.

Obviously, as long as there are people getting sick and requiring medical treatment, there will be a need for nurses. This need isn't going anywhere soon, and the current shortage of nurses across the United States only makes a nursing degree more valuable.

Choose Who You Work With

When most people picture a nurse, they picture someone working in a hospital attending directly to their patients. This kind of nursing might account for the bulk of the most common nursing jobs and nurses have a role to play in a variety of different settings. One of the best things about pursuing a career in nursing is that it is easy to transition from one type of nursing to another; you just have to be willing to undertake the necessary training or qualifications.

Most nursing roles involve more technology than many people realize, and technology is only playing a greater part in the nursing profession as time goes on. Lots of tech enthusiasts gravitate towards research roles, which enable them to work first-hand with new technology and ideas. But any the following nursing roles will afford you the opportunity to use technology to help improve people's lives.

• General hospital work: No matter where you hope to end up as a nurse, you will almost definitely be spending your first few years working on the front lines in hospitals. Just as the police have to work the beat before they can become detectives, nurses need to get experience working directly with patients on a daily basis in a hospital before they can move into more specialized scenarios.
  
  
• Pediatric nurse: While much of healthcare is universal, there are also many situations in which people require a more specialized approach. While children and adults have essentially the same physiology, treating the same conditions can sometimes require a very different approach depending on the age of the patient. If you want to work specifically with children, you should consider studying to be a PNP nurse.
  
  
• Physician’s assistant: Working as a physician's assistant is going to be a lot less hectic and stressful than working in an accident and emergency environment. However, while the work of an assistant might seem comparatively mundane, it is equally important. You will also get to see first-hand how diagnoses are made, and the role the technology is playing in helping doctors to make diagnoses.
  
  

Be On The Frontlines Of Using New Tech To Save Lives

Nursing is ground zero for many of the most exciting technologies on the horizon today. Healthcare technology moves at an incredibly fast-paced, blink and the latest development really can pass you by in an instant. Regardless of where you choose to work as a nurse, here are just a few of the exciting technologies that you can expect to work with.

• Machine learning: There are a lot of misconceptions about what machine learning is and what it is capable of. But one thing that machine learning is showing great promise at is interpreting data in order to make diagnoses. With machine learning tools, we can gain a much deeper understanding of the data that we gather about patients and potentially make much more accurate diagnoses.
  
  
• Wearable diagnostic tools: Wearable diagnostics and passive monitoring of patients are both very important technologies for the future of healthcare. The United States population is growing and aging, meaning that healthcare facilities throughout the system are being put under increasing strain. If a patient's bed or clothes are able to continuously monitor their most important vital signs, and relay an alarm to healthcare staff if there is an issue, it means that nurses do not have to be constantly going back and forth to check that their patients are ok.
  
  
• Smart systems: It seems that these days you can put the smart in front of just about anything and come up with a new invention. However, don't be fooled into thinking that this is all just a passing fad or the overuse of the latest buzzword. Smart systems have a critical role to play in the future of healthcare, as demonstrated by the increasing uptake across the country of the smart bed. Smart hospital beds have basic diagnostic functions, but they are also able to physically adjust their structure just enough to prevent bedsores and other complications for patients who have to spend significant time in them.
  
  

Pursue A Research Career

For nurses who are passionate about technology and science, the work of a research nurse will definitely speak to them. While there are dedicated research nurse positions available, for nurses who want to assist drug companies in completing their drug trials, for example, any nurse can take part in research, regardless of the setting where they work.

Being involved in research means that you don't just get to help the patients that you treat, instead, you get to contribute to the evolution of the entire field of nursing and potentially help innumerable people, many of whom you will never meet.

Nursing is an excellent field for curious tech-heads to get into. Not only will you be able to help other people and make a difference, but you will have excellent job security and the chance to regularly indulge your passions.