Family nurse practitioners have one of the most rewarding careers in the healthcare field out there. With a higher level of autonomy than most traditional nurses, they have the ability to diagnose patients and recommend the best ways of care, making them a crucial part of any community. Whether you have completed a nursing degree and want to go into further specializations, or you are looking to start nursing for the first time, then you have definitely come to the right place. This article will describe all of the different benefits that are available to you once you have a family nurse practitioner degree. Read on now in order to get the complete overview. Before we explain its benefits, however, it’s worth asking:
What is a Family Nurse Practitioner?
A family nurse practitioner degree is perfect for nurses who want to embrace a more complex role focusing on the family as a whole. They focus on promoting good health and educating people on best practices and are expected to deal with a wide variety of different people. They are also allowed to operate with a large degree of personal discretion, making them one of the most powerful roles within the healthcare field. They develop long relationships with their patients, making it one of the most rewarding roles out there.
What Do You Study in a Family Nurse Practitioner Degree?
The main drive behind a family nurse practitioner degree is to learn about patient care. You are tooled with a wide perspective of clinical training, learning to have a holistic approach that covers mental health, spiritual health, physical health, and social needs. This can cover topics as diverse as minor operations, physiology, dieting, pharmacology, behavior, and focusing on wellness above all. With that said, the more specialized type of learning that you can expect to tackle does differ rather significantly depending on the type of specific training that you want to go into. It’s worth taking a proper look at the coursework involved before signing up for a degree so you know exactly what you should prepare for.
How Do You Get a Family Nurse Practitioner Degree?
It takes a long time to become a family nurse practitioner due to the importance of the role. On average, it takes between eight and ten years to finally hold that position. First of all, you would be expected to have a bachelor of science in nursing or master of science in nursing, which takes around four to five years. Afterward, you would be expected to get a license as a registered nurse before spending about two to three years training in that role.
Afterward, you need a master’s degree in nursing or a doctorate before you become certified by passing an exam from an institution such as the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners or the American Nurses’ Credentialing Center. If you are interested in getting this qualification, you might want to look at Texas Woman’s University. TWU’s FNP degree is one of the finest that you can get.
What Are the Key Benefits of a Family Nurse Practitioner Degree?
The previous part of this article was focused on explaining some of the key facts about a family nurse practitioner degree, namely what the role itself involves and the steps that are needed in order to be qualified. Now the rest of the article will focus on the kind of benefits that one can expect from taking part in the degree.
High Salary
If you work as a family nurse practitioner, you can command a higher salary than working as a traditional nurse. According to PayScale, the average starting salary for somebody in this role can expect to command around $81,000 a year. The median range is even better, going up to $97,000, meaning that one can live comfortably in basically any city within the USA. For those in the top echelons, they can expect an even higher salary, stretching to a highly reasonable $119,000 a year. This reflects the fact that one has to invest a lot of time and money into such a degree, making it a difficult path but ultimately a very rewarding one.
Career Diversity
For those who don’t want to stop at just working as a general nurse practitioner within a family setting, the degree is an amazing stepping stone for those who want to move into further specializations. It is just worth bearing in mind that, just like being a family nurse practitioner requires specific certifications, any specialization will require further qualification and verification from a specific nursing board. The types of careers that a family nurse practitioner can go into include, but are not limited to:
- Neonatal Nurse
- Oncology Nurse
- Midwife
- Acute Care Nurse
- Clinical Nurse
- Infection Control Nurse
- Pediatric Nurse
- Geriatric Nurse
- Military Nurse
- Trauma Nurse
- Nurse Researcher
- Nurse Advocate
- Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse
- Nurse Educator
- Public Health Nurse
- Dialysis Nurse
- Informatics Nurse
- Nurse Anaesthetist
As a lot of these different careers can differ quite significantly, requiring different levels of care and specialization, one can expect the salary expectations for these roles to be rather different. Take a look around at the different specializations in order to see which ones might be the most appealing to you.
Become a Respected Member Within Your Community
Some people thrive and deeply enjoy working within a community where they know a lot of people, especially over a long period of time. If you work as a family nurse practitioner, this means that you are truly embedded within the community within which you live. Therefore, if you are thinking about giving back to the place you live, taking a career as a family nurse practitioner can be one of the most amazing ways in order to give back.
This is especially true when working in rural or small-town settings. This may also mean coming into contact with people who disagree with you, for example, those who do not want to take the coronavirus vaccine due to political reasons, and being able to calmly assure them why they actually do need you to help administer them the proper level of medical care in order to live a happier life.
Ability to Make Your Own Decisions
In a professional setting, there is something quite powerful about being able to make your own decisions. Thankfully for you, if you work as a family nurse practitioner, you can diagnose patients yourself and make key recommendations for treatment. This is rather different from most nursing roles, where nurses are often required to refer ideas to doctors themselves when it comes to actually treating the patient. One point to bear in mind, however, is that the regulations do differ depending on the state within which you live. It’s worth figuring out the regulations in the state where you want to practice so you can have the best idea of how autonomous you can actually be.
Grow into a Leadership Role
Leaders thrive upon taking their wide variety of experiences and turning them into roles to help the wider community at large. As those who work as family nurse practitioners already have such a high level of experience as well as contact with those from across the community, covering every age, sex, race, and background, they are perfectly primed to translate what they do into more public-facing roles. Family nurse practitioners can then work in policy roles or even run for political office, meaning that it is a role that helps to complement the leader mentality.
Promote a Holistic Lifestyle
Despite popular misconceptions, healthcare is not just about treating disease. It’s also about fostering a healthy mindset within patients to make sure that these types of diseases do not occur in the first place. This type of thinking has been somewhat popularized by the coronavirus pandemic, especially when considering that a lot of deaths of people under 80 were those who had co-morbidities. This means that a family nurse practitioner can actually get to grips with improving the health of the community as a whole instead of simply diagnosing a problem once it has already occurred. They may be expected to give talks at schools and workplaces on best practices when it comes to being healthy.
Conclusion
It has been the hope of this guide to give an insight into what one can do after studying for a family nurse practitioner degree. As you can see, it is a position that requires a lot of work but can be immensely rewarding for those willing to put the effort in. Not only can family nurse practitioners be allowed to operate in most states with a huge level of autonomy, but they are able to embed themselves into the communities in which they serve. If everything that you have read has made you interested in pursuing this type of education, there is no time like the present to now go out and pursue your dream.
