How an Irish nurse can progress through the system

What opportunities are there in nursing and how do you progress as a nurse? Claire shares some information on how you can do just that.

Hey, welcome back to Healthcarejobs.ie!

Today I'm going to talk about how an Irish nurse can progress through the system, so stay tuned to find out more.

So there are three ways an Irish nurse could progress through the system; it's through improving your clinical skills, going into education and research and also management.

Clinical progression

So progressing in the clinical role includes starting out as a staff nurse I'm improving and getting more skills and things like that, and then going up the ranks and maybe becoming a sister and then going on to a clinical nurse specialist if you want, and then an ANP.

There are opportunities to become a matron and things like that in Ireland which is really good, so there are always more opportunities than just a staff nurse, that everyone starts out to be.

There are CNS and things like that which are very specialized so you might have to do some extra training and added learning but this will improve your pay by getting a pay rise and will also improve your opportunities to be able to go further and do different things, such as becoming an advanced nurse practitioner and things like that.

So improving your skills would be the main reason why you would get such jobs, and then also having a lot of experience in a particular area will obviously help.

Spending time in the particular area you're in; so let's say if you're in oncology, you would start out working in oncology as a staff nurse and then maybe within a year or two, or three years or four years depending on how long it takes you, you might start managing the wards.

Then you might go for a sister role or a ward sister and then if you really like oncology then you might want to specialize in certain type of cancer, and then from there, you could become a CNS which is a clinical nurse specialist.

That will give you a lot more opportunities because it's very specialized, so you'd be going around to the exact people that have a particular type of cancer and then from there you become an advanced nurse practitioner in oncology.

It's not as specific as a clinical nurse specialist but it's more just an expert in oncology as a whole, so, therefore, you have to be highly skilled and know exactly what to treat and how to treat it.

I know in England they're considered the same level as junior doctors, so a lot of experience and knowledge I knowing how to do everything.

So yeah an ANP is a great role if you can find availability in your area.

Read more

• All you need to know about working as a nurse in Ireland

• How to become a nurse or midwife in Ireland

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Progression through education and research

Okay, so the next one is education and research.

People sometimes forget that as a nurse you can do so much with your degree.

You can go into education and become a lecturer, you can then progress and become a senior lecturer, you can work for the School of Nursing and progress up the ranks.

You can also work for the Higher Education Institute, the HEI, and this will enable you to have lots of different roles as a nurse but also further education and research.

Then there's also the opportunity to go into things like cancer research where you will be a cancer research nurse, lots of different type of cancers - I'm mainly focusing on oncology because that's what I want to go into, but I know for orthopaedics and you can go into research about like new ways of operating.

There are so many opportunities for nurse researchers which are becoming more and more and prevalent in nursing.

The opportunities to become a lecturer are endless - all of the unis are always looking for lecturers and it's a like a life long career.

Let's say you've done your years and years on the boards you progress to be a CNS or ANP, and now you're looking to give back what you've learned and to share your knowledge, because that's part of a nurse's role is to share what they know with the future generations of Nursing.

So definitely education is one way to do that, and obviously further research to go into new cures for things would be incredible.

Progressing in management

Part three is management.

So this includes being a nurse manager.

A clinical nurse manager would be managing the wards and things like that, so management includes supervising staff and making sure that everything is in order.

You can also walk work with the corporate side of hospitals and things like that, and directors of Nursing.

All of these are very like managerial roles, not so much ward based but have become more of overseeing everything and making sure everything's going good.

Like I mentioned earlier, nursing matrons, directors of Nursing, clinical nurse managers; all of these are steering away from clinical roles and stepping into more of a managerial role.

So if this is something that you would consider then check for availabilities for things like Director of Nursing and things like that.

Obviously, you need a lot of experience behind you in order to go for these roles but there's something to consider if you've been a nurse for quite a while and gained up lots of experience.

So I just want to share with you that you can progress as a nurse so much and along your career - you can start out as a staff nurse and work your way up to a director of nursing.

There's so much nursing has to offer and I think it's an amazing career.

There's so much you can do with this so if you like the sound of any of these then do your research and find out more about each role.

Thank you so much for listening, bye for now!

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