Healthcare needs change with time. Communities all over the country, literally most of them, have experienced shortages, not just in the general context of being shy of a few nurses, but also in terms of specialization. They don’t always have the right people for the right job.
There are so many different things that can go wrong with a person, each one of them requiring a very specific set of skills and understanding. It’s hard for even large cities to stay stocked up on professionals who are capable of handling anything that comes along. For rural communities, it’s proven almost impossible.
In this article, we take a look at how career development opportunities can help healthcare systems on both the administrative and patient care ends of the spectrum.
What Does Career Development Look Like?
Career development can take many shapes and forms. It can happen over the course of a weekend conference where professionals get together and exchange ideas, listen to keynote speakers, take home pamphlets, and meet with sales reps who naturally enough have an expensive product ready and available to meet any imaginable need.
These short-form career development opportunities are common and indeed often required for healthcare professionals to maintain their licenses.
Continuing education is necessary in healthcare because it’s an industry that changes. A doctor who started their career 25 years ago would be entering an entirely different world of electronic health records, let alone the advanced data software or AI programs that are now currently changing the way healthcare is performed.
These conferences are nice, but they are also imperfect. How much can one really learn over a weekend? What happens over a few hours of independent study?
For healthcare professionals and the systems that they work in looking for robust help, there are continuing education options that involve new certifications.
For healthcare providers on the care end of the spectrum, there are about a million ways to keep up with the latest trends. Most of them involve some form of course enrollment, either in graduate studies or in specialized certification programs. Nursing is particularly famous for its many specialized offerings.
There are quite literally dozens of different certification paths out there, ranging both in complexity and in types of responsibilities. Most of them take several years to complete, but they have the benefit of allowing the nurse to begin working in their new career right away.
For example, if you want to begin a career as a forensic nurse working with law enforcement to treat victims of crime and collect forensic evidence on the scene, you will need hundreds of hours of field experience before you are fully certified. How do you get that field experience? By working in the job, of course.
It’s a little like a long paid internship where, prior to your full certification, you will most likely work under some form of supervision. The actual amount of supervision required may fluctuate with time. The closer you get to completing your degree, the more independent work you’ll likely be able to do.
Certifications are great for several reasons. For one thing, they allow the nurse to focus on something that really matters a lot to them. Working as a floor nurse is very meaningful and certainly impactful, but it involves a lot of generalized care. You treat the person who walks through the door.
Even when you’re on a specific floor of the hospital consistently, you’re not necessarily following your bliss. Certifications, on the other hand, allow you to focus really specifically on an area of medicine that interests you the most. It’s also great for communities because it helps to fill big gaps in their healthcare system and avoid bottlenecks.
Doctors can’t see everyone all the time. For one thing, there are shortages for MDs just like there are for nurses. For another, and this is maybe healthcare’s best-kept secret, they don’t know everything. Their education is, in many cases, more general, the same way a nurse’s education is more general. Or in the case of a specialized physician, it’s dialed into five or six things and may not have involved much of a focus on certain obscure conditions.
That is why, in certain contexts, a diabetes educator, that’s a special type of nurse, may know more about diabetes than the patient’s general care physician or even the doctor that a patient sees in the ER.
This makes an enormous difference that can reduce wait times within a healthcare system and allow doctors to focus on more complicated cases. That’s why many healthcare systems are increasingly incorporating advanced practice nurses, including nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and so on, to create leaner, more effective teams.
On the Administrative End
Many of the same benefits extend to the world of administrative care. These are the desk jobs of the healthcare system, less glamorous maybe than patient care positions, but just as important. Administrators may never deal with the more difficult components of working with ailing patients, but they will make choices that have an impact at the community level.
For administrators, there are plenty of options too, though they look a little different than what you might find for nurses or doctors. You can get a Master of Health Administration degree, which is sort of like an MBA but focused specifically on healthcare systems. There are also shorter certificate programs in things like health informatics or compliance, and plenty of professional associations that offer courses when new regulations come out or when technology changes the way hospitals operate.
Be a Part of the Change
Joining your local healthcare system and wondering how to become an RN in NC? If you are exploring your education options, note that there are so many ways to become a nurse. Traditional brick-and-mortar learning institutions still get the lion’s share of attention, but they represent just one of the many ways that people prepare for this exciting and impactful work.
There are online universities, hybrid universities, and there are curriculums that consist only of prerecorded lectures that you’re able to complete at your own timeline. There are curriculums that meet online but follow essentially the same structure as physical learning environments. Find the path forward that makes the most sense for you.
