This paper is an assessment of two career paths within the field of nursing: Nurse practitioner and director of nursing.
This paper discusses that nurse practitioners, requiring advanced degrees, provide primary care to patients under the supervision of physicians and may prescribe medicines. This paper also discusses that directors of nursing, requiring at least a master’s degree, sometimes a business degree and often a doctoral degree, are part of the hospital’s management rather than its staff. The paper concludes that, while both careers lie within the profession of nursing, they will appeal to very different personality types.
“While both the nurse practitioner and the director of nursing technically serve within the same field, their careers (in terms of the tasks that they perform during their daily work routines and the specific rewards, challenges, and responsibilities that each one faces) are substantially different from each other. This should not surprise us at all: Both the editor-in-chief of The New York Times and a news assistant running errands at a small weekly paper in Mexico City are journalists, but they have very different jobs.”