Long term care nurses are those who provide ongoing care to those with chronic physical or mental problems. As such it’s really a whole great big barrel full of specialties all in itself. You might specialize in treating those with learning difficulties, or autism, or schizophrenia: you might specialize in the diseases of children or adults, in specific diseases, or you might find yourself, if working in a small town or area, working with a mixture of all of them. You could also be working in hospitals (or even mental hospitals) or out in the community, tending to people in their own homes.

As you can see in this listing of the different types of nursing, there are many blurs between the different types. The important distinction here is that long term care nurses treat those with chronic diseases: as long as they are properly treated the illnesses are not going to kill the patients, but nor is the treatment going to cure them either. It might remove some of the symptoms, make them feel better, but that’s what chronic means, that it’s not going to go away.

As with all forms of nursing the training is via one of three different routes: a college degree in nursing, a two year college degree in nursing or a Diploma, all then followed by a licencing exam. Many of those who start with the latter two routes then go on, later, to take the full college degree as that’s how to get the promotions and the interesting (or more so) jobs.

As for our EQSQ personality tests, like almost all forms of nursing, you’ll want to be at the female brain end, the empathizing, to make a good go of this career.

Being a hospice and palliative care nurse is, to my mind at least, one of the most difficult and harrowing jobs in the world. It’s taking care of those who are dying and making sure that their pain is relieved as they do so. You might work in a hospice or with people in their own homes: but for people like me the difficult thing would be to know that each and every one of your patients is going to die, usually within the next few weeks. There will be no miracle cures, no getting better, just the management of pain as they descend into that long dark night.

As you can imagine, spending your working life with those who are about to die takes a special sort of person. From our EQSQ personality tests, those at the extreme end of the empathizing, or female brain type. Some will have gone through the various psychological stages and be prepared, having come to an acceptance that this is how life ends for all of us. Others will be angry, ashamed even, some decrying their bad luck and demanding to know “Why Me?”. Then there is also the physical aspect, to add to this mental strain. Those who die in their own beds tend not to do so of things like heart attacks and accidents: it’s a slow process of the body shutting down, withering away.

I’m making it sound very gloomy, I know, for it can indeed be that way. But there is another side to it, hospices can be incredibly cheerful places. All there are aware that they must make the most of the last few pleasures that life has to offer, and you, while working there will be amazed at the resilience of the human spirit.

A tough job though, and you’ll want to have a look at those personality tests to make sure that before you decide upon this specialty, you’ve got the right sort of character to be able to deal with it.

Home health care nurses are another of the sub groups that nurses fall into. If you prefer you could say it’s another of the specialties that you could take up within the profession. As with all forms of registered nursing, a college degree is not required but it certainly helps. In fact, many people who come into nursing with out a college degree, through some of the vocational training schemes, for example, find that they will go on to get their BSN, as it makes both promotion and the more interesting jobs so much easier to get.

Home health care nurses go into peoples’ homes (as you might expect) and help them with the aftermath of surgery, accidents and childbirth (which in itself is sometimes an accident, ho, ho). The actual treatment is all fairly regular: it has to be, otherwise these patients would still be in hospital. But there are two things that make it really quite interesting. The first is that, unless you’re working in a very large city, the different patients will all be being treated for different things: so there’s a variation in what you’ll actually be doing. The second of course is that as you’re visiting people in their homes you’ll be in several different places each day.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, like almost all nursing, you’ll both enjoy it more and be better at this job if you are at the empathizing, or female brain end of the results. It’s not quite as extreme as the next specialty that we’re going to discuss, hospice nursing, but the basics of nursing people in their homes do mean that a healthy dose of empathy will be required.

Continuing with our jaunt through the various types of nurses we come to holistic nurses. This can cause some confusion as “holistic” as a word really just means treating the whole, a veiled criticism of conventional medicine which attempts to treat the disease rather than the patient. But in this specific meaning “holistic”, as it refers to nurses, means those who use treatments like acupuncture, massage and aromatherapy.

Even this can be controversial as there are those who insist (and I’m often among them) that such alternative treatments are not in fact medicine at all. At one end of course this is true, waving crystals at someone does nothing at all for them. However, that’s not to say that these treatments don’t have a value at all: much of it is in the placebo value.

For example, let us take the example of someone who is a little run down, perhaps a touch depressed. Not to the point of needing happy pills or anything, just a touch of the glums. This can indeed lead to disease as even mild depression is correlated with a depressed immune system. How should we treat them?

We could be rather callous and simply tell them to get their act together but this is not known to be all that helpful. We could treat them with drugs but again, not all that helpful when side effects are taken into account. We could stick needles into them until they stop complaining but acupuncture doesn’t actually work that way, nor do the other complementary treatments. It’s that placebo effect that does though. Half an hour, an hour, of someone devoting their attention to us does in fact make us feel better. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Swedish massage or one with scented oils, we perk up and lose some of our depression.

Given that this is the way holistic medicine works, those best suited to it by our EQSQ personality tests are easy to identify: those with the most empathy, those at the female end of the personality tests’ results. Given that it is the human interaction, the care being shown, the empathy in fact, which effects the cure, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

I thought it would be interesting to have a quick look at this list of 39 jobs where women earn more than men. We hear so much about the gender pay gap that looking at where women do indeed earn more than men might give us some guidance as to why this might be so. Look at the opposite to see how it illuminates if you like.

Some of the professions need college degrees, others require little in the way of qualification at all, certainly not college degrees. Some illustrate the things that we talk about in relation to our EQSQ personality tests, some illustrate more the problems with the classifications themselves. For example, bellhop, porters and concierges: yes, it may well be true that women earn more here but that’s probably due to the fact that concierges earn more in wages (but not tips) and that concierges are more likely to be female than the other two.

The biggest difference is with sales engineers and that does speak to our personality tests. The art of sales is finding out what the customer wants: seeing things from their point of view or in our terminology, empathy. There are others that we could see in this manner, personal care workers, funeral services, speech language pathologists.

Some are entirely bizarre: why would female projectionists earn more than male? Mechanics? (Perhaps that customer service thing again?)

But an interesting list I think you’ll agree, offering some proof of our basic contentions, some oddities that we cannot explain (no one has ever said that our theory is perfect) and in most cases where the pay gap goes against our theory, we can see other confounding factors to explain it.

This is the type of nursing which we’re all familiar with from watching the TV shows, good looking people jumping around and shouting “Stat” at each other. While that’s a caricature it is true that this can be both the most draining, in both a physical and emotional sense, of all forms of nursing: it can also be the most rewarding. Almost by definition, all those who end up in an emergency room (and most especially those requiring trauma nursing) are seriously ill and most are near death without appropriate treatment. It might be the result of a heart attack, stroke or accident, but the appropriate and prompt treatment will have them walking out of there in a few days while no or bad treatment will have them leaving in their coffins.

This means that by our EQSQ personality tests emergency and trauma nurses need to be rather more hard hearted than most other nurses. Yes, of course, to empathize with the patients is necessary but there are times when very hard decisions have to be made. It can be that the treatment will cause more pain in the short term: it can also be that (in what is known as triage) treating one person for a long time will mean another dies waiting. So some problems are left, whatever the result, for the greater good. It’s also true that no effective treatment is possible at all sometimes, so you might simply have to watch someone die.

Having said how difficult emergency nursing is, it’s also worth pointing out the other side of it, its effectiveness. This is the payoff, the reward to those who have the personality test results to be able to do it. Treatment gets better every year and people who, ten years ago, would have inevitably died can now be treated and walk out again, back into the bosom of their families, after only a day or two.

There’s a reason why those TV shows have a nurse or two looking misty eyed as the adorable little tot scampers out, hand in hand with her parents after beating some cruel disease or accident with the nurses’ help.

It’s true, it actually happens, it’s what makes the job such a joy to do.

There’s a similarity between critical care nurses and the ambulatory nurses, it’s not treating the patients for the same problems or diseases all the time. However, in another sense, that meant by our EQSQ personality tests, they’re very different. For the clinic nurses are dealing with walk-in patients, those who might have anything from a slight scrape to a need for referral to an emergency room. You, as a critical care nurse, will almost certainly be working with those with already in an intensive care ward: indeed, most of your patients will never actually be fully conscious while you’re there. They might have heart or lung failure for example, or be coming out of surgery (although there are other specialties that deal with this as well).

As such, the pleasant bedside manner and ability to deal with different personalities (from the more empathic end of the results from our personality tests) are rather less important. It’s also true that monitoring the patients, attending to the details of the treatment of these severely ill people calls more upon the systemizing side of your personality.

The joy of both types of nursing is in the variability, the changes that each day brings. It’s not the procession of the same patients with the same problems each and every day, rather, a series of different things, and as we know, variety is the spice of life, is it not?

As the first of our types and distinctions of nurses we have the ambulatory care nurse. This is a distinction based upon where and when the treatment is offered. Possibly regular, or possibly just the one visit, treatment of a vast myriad of problems. It can be anything from dealing with regular dialysis sessions through to providing some headache pills in a clinic in a factory or workplace. We could take the ambulatory to mean that it’s you, the nurse, who walks around but that’s not quite what is meant. Rather that the patients both walk in and out: that is, they’re not severely ill. This is, along with the treatments above, also about preventive care, check ups and so on.

As far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned of course, almost all nursing care requires very large amounts of empathy but this requires it on more than one count. There’s not only the fact that you’ll be caring for people, but that there will be a fairly large number of them over time. This places an emphasis upon people interaction skills, another part of the empathic character by our personality tests.

Another side of ambulatory nursing is its variability. You might be working in any number of places, out patient clinics, care or rest homes, schools, even large offices, which is what can make it interesting. It won’t be the same problems coming in all the time, you’ll be the first line in the diagnosis of what is actually happening to the patients.

While we’re on the subject of the different types of registered nurses I need to explain something about categorization. With a few exceptions, there are four basic ways of dividing up the different areas of nursing. It’s entirely possible (and it is in fact usual) to combine one or more of these different specialties. So there’s a definite sense of mix and match available, which slightly complicates whatever we might say about the results of our EQSQ personality tests.

The four areas are, by where the treatment takes place, by the disease being treated, by the part of the body being treated or by the type of person being treated. So, to be slightly silly about it, we could have a nurse who specializes in treating lung problems in a clinic, or in a hospital ward (”place”), a nurse dealing with lung cancer (disease), or lung problems (organ) or breathing problems in the old (person). Similarly, we might have a nurse who specializes in al treatments of the old, or of any lung disease anywhere and so on.

As you can imagine, the mixture of empathic requirements and systemizing are going to change markedly, depending upon whether you’re working with whoever comes into the emergency room next, purely with children ill with cancer or in a vaccination center for the healthy. So to work out precisely which results of our personality tests best suit you to exactly which nursing career is going to be a little difficult, but we’ll give it the old school try in the next few posts.

We’ve looked at registered nurses as a single profession before and I think it’s worth having a look at the different specialties in some more detail. One of the commenters on that earlier post, Jessie, made the point that those different specialties seem to require different qualities, as measured by our EQSQ personality tests, than others. The emotional requirements of working on a terminal care ward (or in a hospice) are going to be vastly different from the more systemizing or technical skills needed in a post-operative care ward, just as an example. So we would expect the different types of nursing to attract those who have different results on our personality tests.

So the next few posts will be looking at the different types of nursing and trying to work through what might be the useful and appropriate skills and talents for each of them.

It shouldn’t be all that much or a surprise that not all forms of nursing require the same things. There are, after all, 2.4 million nurses, perhaps the largest of all of the job classifications (certainly the largest of the professional ones). It’s also true that the basic qualification is the same for everyone, becoming a registered nurse. Yes, there are further possible qualifications to get, but that’s the first and most important. In the training itself you’ll experience a number of different types of work, but there are so many that you’ll not get to try them all.

So an overview, a tiptoe through the alternatives, should be useful so that you can see th various options open to you. Some mean working with children, others exclusively with the old, some with the extremely ill and others require almost no contact with the patients at all.