Hello. This Covid thing has got me thinking. I am technically an RN, but only worked as a psych RN for 2 yrs then a psych NP for 3 years now. I'm young and healthy and I really would like to be able to help in a situation like this. I did volunteer to go to NY and they are going to get back to me on whether they need psych help. But really, I would love to have basic med/surg skills (is that even the right goal?) so that I could go help in a situation like this. This isn't out of guilt or anything, I just would really like to acquire the minimum medical skills necessary to aid in an emergency.
1. Is this realistic?
2. What is the best approach? Nurse refresher course? FNP post-grad cert?
3. How much time do you think this would entail?
Thank you!
I’m the kind of person who likes to be prepared for extra things that might come up, so I identify with the desire to expand your skill set to that end. I started out as an RN on the medical side and spent time in the ER, ICU, and medical floors before settling in on psyche, then becoming a PMHNP. Psyche is really where I belong and where i could make the most impact. I came to appreciate that I could be adequate on the medical side, but exceptional on the psyche side. I also came to appreciate that if I were to go back in time to before modern nursing, I’d find that most nurses would be almost useless in a world without the tools we take for granted today. We’ve essentially built a society where the knowledge we learn applies tightly with the world we live in with little application beyond our confines.
While it may seem satisfying to dabble in the art of medical nursing, it might be more trouble than it’s worth to get in there and get your hands dirty in something you really haven’t mastered over the last few years. I’m not under the impression that they simply need warm bodies, but that they need folks suited for that environment and that know the role quite well. For all we know they might need more custodial staff than nurses who don’t know the ins and outs of the facility, but I doubt many of our egos would let us deign to fill that role because we consider our skill set to be interchangeable with something a bit more glamorous on the front lines. So I suggest that no, you have so little exposure to what you would see yourself doing that you’d be wasting everyone’s time. If you didn’t start out as a medical nurse, but instead jumped into psyche from the start, you are even less suited for that environment than I am, and I started in medical nursing, but have been out of it for many years. So even I would feel out of place going to help out in the medical side. You can’t take a refresher course because you never had the foundations in the first place. Those foundations are set when you orient and work as a medical nurse, not by going to nursing school. There’s no fast track for you. The only way you would have any business there would be if you quit your PMHNP job, got and RN job in an ER, ICU or medical unit, worked there for 8-12 months, and then went over there to help out. That would still make you somewhat of a rookie nurse, though. But at least you would be competent. You get no fast track to that role by virtue of simply having gone to RN school. Likewise, you don’t get to be an astronaut just because you once took lessons to be a pilot.
What you can do, however, (and I would encourage this), is go offer to help out on a mental health floor as an RN, so that they can have coverage in the event that they need to meet their staffing needs by using nurses with medical skills that would otherwise be able to go down an help out on medical floors. And keep in mind that mental health units are very much the frontlines as well in this battle, because people are coming into those wards with COVID too. Nurses are getting sick on mental health units left and right, especially with them needing to take in folks that fit into a significant at-risk demographic. They are dealing with homeless and mentally ill individuals, and are probably all doing it while lacking all the masks and gear that the medical units have available.
The ONLY way you should practice is in what you are already familiar with, which is psyche nursing and psyche NP roles. Your original idea is really just another form of tourism, except it’s like attending funerals of strangers so you can get in on the solidarity. I’m sure that sounds harsh, but it would be healthy to get in touch with why you want to do things the way you want to do them vs doing what would have the most impact.
