Career advice -- and commentary on current healthcare news and trends for savvy 21st-century nurses and healthcare providers -- from holistic nurse career coach Keith Carlson, RN, BSN, NC-BC. Since 2005.
Where would the country be without nurses? Without nurses, the healthcare system would essentially grind to a halt. We call nurses the lifeblood of healthcare, and they're also the connective tissue and the veritable mitochondria, the cellular powerhouses of the delivery of patient care.
But nurses are more than that. Ask most members of the public, the media, and even legislative bodies, and they'll tell you that nurses take care of sick people in hospitals. However, if only 55 percent of nurses work in acute care facilities, there's a whole lot more that they do. Hospitals are crucial, of course, but there's more to nursing than units like the ED, the ICU, med-surg, and telemetry.