this happens in Germany. I know our healthcare systems are different but there are way more north American members on lemmy than German ones. I’m simply listening to points of view. What a physician assistant does is fairly the same in both countries.
As said, I’m a nurse working bedside and I don’t plan to this sometimes sh*tjob for the rest of my life. I don’t like dealing with my coworker’s petty problems and their need to talk and criticize people behind their backs.
Reasons to study PA are I’m cerebral and prefer to read and learn than to talk, I like knowing my medicines and therapies, interpreting EKGs, explaining to patients what they should and shouldn’t do, checking labor parameters to decide if we have to increase or decrease an antibiotic… I don’t want to work bedside with a growing old, overweight and demented patient population (already punched twice and proposed to have sex 2 times as well). I don’t want to be ridiculed by my coworkers each time I open a book to read about medicine simply because I want to know more.
Doctors where I am are usually mature coworkers. I don’t mean all doctors are grown ups (they are not) but there are more grown ups among the doctors than among the nurses: nurses I work with love to talk about sex and tiktok and going to smoke whereas doctors usually talk about patients and therapies, at least most of them when I hear them.
Overall doctors seem to be less chatty with less drama and more professional, more grown up.
I know that as a PA I’m not a doctor and I’d only earn EUR 300 per month more than now as a nurse and I’m still thinking if it pays to study 3 years to earn just a bit more, not really much more but hopefully work with grown ups.
This is not something I’d pay myself but I’d have to find a hospital that offers a bachelor as a PA as a so called Duales Studium where you work 50% and study the other 50% but you still receive your normal salary, but for this I’d have to move 200 km south.
If you’re a PA or plan to become one, am I being naive? Is there really less drama?
Do you regret it?
From a US perspective. Depending on the specialty a PA will do 99% of what a doctor does. In more surgical specialities they tend to do most of the pre and post op work. The US also has NPs (nurse practitioners) which are very similar in function to a PA. The big difference is that an NP is taught medicine from a nursing perspective, while a PA is more explicit in the partnership with a doctor. As a PA or NP you would be more of a peer with a doctor, so you would likely see different sides of doctors and nurses than you currently do.
You can expect different drama, maybe not less. I can’t say what specifically would be the case in Germany. In the US it’s mostly about balancing patient care with paperwork, and battling insurance companies. The ratio of practicing medicine vs bureaucratic bullshit is currently very skewed towards bureaucracy in the US.
A European PA is more like a US NP afaik
You can expect different drama, maybe not less. I can’t say what specifically would be the case in Germany. In the US it’s mostly about balancing patient care with paperwork, and battling insurance companies.
I think this is a drama I can live with. What I meant with drama is gossip among the nurses: who had sex with whom, who has how many children, who said what about somebody else… something I hate with a burning passion.
Maybe I’m naive? I still find this bureaucratic drama easier to survive than my current coworkers.
Well, here in the U.S., the gap between what an RN does and what a PA does is pretty big. But we also have nurse practitioners that are roughly equivalent to a PA in terms of scope, with an NP having a master’s degree. We also have bachelor’s programs for nursing that’s essentially an administrative add-on to RN training, with some other advanced nursing training as well.
Pay scales between an NP and PA are similar, usually +/- 5 or so thousand USD per year. Depends a lot on where you are, and what kind of place you’re working in
Both are also generally going to be the ones giving orders regarding patient care, rather than the ones doing patient care, as in drawing blood, and that sort of thing. But both are able to do similar types of procedures, if not exactly the same
To the best of my understanding, a nurse in Germany is roughly equivalent to an RN here, in that the day to day work is going to be very similar.
So, you would, as a PA (and that is even more similar to the U.S. than an RN), be doing the kind of work you prefer. I have both a PA and an NP at the office I go to for medical care. They both order and interpret tests, provide education, do examinations, prescribe medications.
But as far as the kind of patient you’d deal with, nobody can completely avoid aging patients, and trying to only see non overweight patients is both iffy and weird. Patients with dementia, that’s going to depend on where you’re working. If you work in pediatrics, you can avoid most of the dementia cases though, and all of the geriatric ones. But you won’t have to work beside unless you’re in a facility.
Drama? No such thing as a medical staff that doesn’t gossip and have drama. Yeah, there’s less of it with doctors, but that’s because the doctors don’t work side by side as much.
So, overall, if Germany is similar in terms of how in-office culture works, you’re only naive if you think you can escape drama lol
We also have bachelor’s programs for nursing that’s essentially an administrative add-on to RN training, with some other advanced nursing training as well.
do these nurses remain at bedside after finishing the bachelor?
But as far as the kind of patient you’d deal with, nobody can completely avoid aging patients, and trying to only see non overweight patients is both iffy and weird.
I don’t have a problem seeing and giving advice to the ageing patient, his DPA (durable power of attorney) or to an overweight patient. What I have a problem with is washing and moving the overweight patient that’s more dead weight than anything else, because I don’t know how ratios are where you work at, but where I am most of the times I have to do that alone. And then I’m the one taking ibuprofen or calling in sick because my back hurts.
Something similar happens with dementia patients: doctors have it easy because they enter the orders for antipsychotics and neuroleptics but don’t get to be punched, repeatedly insulted or sexually assaulted by the demented patient.
And this is something I don’t want to happen to me regularly. I can work as a PA with demented patients, not as a nurse.
you’re only naive if you think you can escape drama lol
now at least I know what kind of stupid nonsense awaits me if I do this.
thanks for posting.
Well a BSN won’t do bedside care unless they want to. They can, but part of the point of getting the degree is handling different aspects of nursing than just bedside care in a facility setting.
And, yeah, the “higher” you are in the chain of command, the less physical work is involved. Not that it disappears entirely, but even in a hospital, a PA here in the US is going to be able to call in nurses and nurse’s assistants to do the demanding physical work unless it’s an emergency where time is too big a factor, and even then they’d only get started.
Same with dementia patients too. You might have to provide care for them if you’re in a facility that treats dementia, but you wouldn’t do so alone.
I’m honestly amazed you don’t have the equivalent of a nurse’s assistant to help with moving patients though. That’s what I did as my primary job, and we were the ones that an RN would call when a patient needed moving around, if they didn’t want to or couldn’t do it. I’d be responsible for anything from fifteen to thirty patients in nursing homes, so I know exactly what you mean about the ratio killing your body.
The job is part of why I’m disabled now, it is very much a young person’s job, doing the grunt work of patient care.
