Where can medical nursing take you? 4 ways to level-up your career
Want to know my favourite thing about medical nursing?
The opportunities it has unlocked in my career.
Let’s be honest - there are definitely times where we can feel limited as veterinary nurses. It’s all too easy to focus on the day-to-day of our roles, the stress that comes with life in the clinic, the long hours, the busy days.. I could go on.
The biggest thing that helped me enjoy my job as much as I do, is looking at everything around that and reminding myself of the impact I have as a nurse - and medical nursing absolutely helped me realise that.
I’m not even talking about external opportunities, I mean the difference you are making, right now, to the patients and people around you.
Your patients. Your clients. Your colleagues. Your colleague’s patients. Their friends. Their friends’ patients.
You have a much wider impact than you think - and I didn’t realise this until I started getting really passionate about my niche, and really honing in on delivering the best medical care I could.
In this post, I‘m going to share 4 ways you can level-up your nursing career and learn even more about delivering amazing nursing care - and, going beyond that, sharing that knowledge with others.
How do we do this in the clinic?
Collaboration
Our patients get the best care when the entire team can collaborate, discuss patients and share ideas without fear or judgement. Having a one-team approach to medical patient care is so important - especially when these patients are being nursed in the hospital.
We have a unique skill set as VNs - we are ideally placed to support clients and vets, assist with (or perform, depending on the task) different diagnostics and procedures, and we are the eyes, ears and hands on our patients for the majority of the time.
This means that when we collaborate with our vet team, our patients get even better care. So next time you’re anaesthetising a challenging medical patient for a procedure, or you’re updating them on how the inpatients have been across the morning, communicate what you think about your patient loudly and proudly - because you’re a vital member of the team, and the patients benefit tons from your nursing instinct!
Think the patient might be nauseous and would benefit from some antiemetics? Explain the signs you’re seeing to your vet and ask if it would be appropriate to trial some.
Worried about pain? Could the patient have a top-up dose if they’ve already received some analgesia? Is there a local technique we could use? Could we add in different analgesics for multimodal support? Ask your vet if there are any other options, and assess the patient’s response accordingly.
What about fluid therapy? Are you worried your patient is behind on IV fluids, or perhaps showing signs of overload? Can you explain what you’re seeing, and ask your vet what they’d like you to do with the IV fluid rate?
Realising we were in our roles to advocate for our patients, and that our nursing ‘gut instincts’ and knowledge were vital to delivering amazing care, was a huge up-level for me - it really made me see how much difference nurses can make! So don’t be shy to ask questions and pass on concerns to your vet team - collaboration really is key.
Upping your skills
Are there things you want to do practically that you’re not doing right now? Could you be?
If so - speak to your vet team, and to the rest of your nursing team - could you organise some in-house training on this, either by someone in your team, or an external speaker? Is there some practical CPD you could attend to practise those hands-on skills?
There are a lot more opportunities to get more hands-on with medical patients than you might first think - it’s just about recognising the patients that will benefit, speaking to those in charge of your patient’s care about it, and asking if it would be ok for you to watch/perform that task. See one, do one, teach one!
You can even split these across your team, so that people with different niche interests get to practise different related practical skills. For example:
If you love endoscopy, why not learn how to perform local blocks for rhinoscopy patients?
If you love nutrition, why not learn how to place feeding tubes?
If critical care is your thing, what about looking at advanced vascular access options?
There are so many opportunities for us to do more, and by doing it this way, each member of your nursing team is encouraged to embrace their niche, learn and develop new skills.
Reviewing your protocols
If you’ve got an area of interest, can you work with your clinical lead/vet team to evaluate your current protocols in that area? What needs to be reviewed or updated? What does the latest evidence say?
By going through and really applying your passion and knowledge to how you do things in your hospital, your patients and the rest of your team benefit - plus your skills are not just utilised - but really recognised, too!
What about outside of the clinic?
Let’s talk CPD
The most common question I am asked is where RVNs can go to study medical nursing further. Even though medicine is such a broad topic, there are not many courses out there for nurses wanting to learn more about it - especially compared to other subjects like ECC or anaesthesia, for example.
You do have a few options though, such as the NCerts (Medical Nursing, Transfusion Medicine, Feline Nursing) if you want something big, and the RVC eCPD courses for shorter courses (<6 months).
There are hundreds of on-demand platforms out there, too, with everything from webinars to day courses on different diseases - it all depends on what you’re interested in, and what works best for you and your life!
The key with trying to learn more about medicine (take it from someone who had 6 months of constant studying for their VTS exam - to near-breakdown level) is to make it fun.
Learn about subjects you enjoy - you’ll get so much more out of it. Really think about how you can apply that knowledge to a patient, rather than get bogged down in textbooks or thinking about complicated anatomy. Look at the way the disease affects your patient, and relate that to the signs you commonly see. Why are they happening? What does that mean for your patient? What treatment and nursing interventions can we plan to minimise this?
Making it fun
CPD doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. Last year I set up a book club in our clinic with our nurses, for example. We take it in turns to summarise different diseases from a chapter in a medical nursing textbook, and each fortnight, someone presents their summary. We do it over breakfast in the morning before the day starts, and as well as learning new things, we chat about patients we’ve seen with that condition, and why we nursed them in the way we did.
So if you want something less formal, and something that brings your whole team together, why not do something similar in your clinic?
What about delivering CPD?
We’ve spoken a lot about CPD - and one thing that we often don’t do, but really should, is share what we’ve learned with the rest of our team. This has several big benefits:
It cements our knowledge as we’re going back over what we’ve learned
It shares our knowledge with our team so more people learn
It shows your team how much you’ve learned, and what an asset to your practice and patients you are!
If you’re not already doing it, why not start by giving informal short talks at your nurse meetings, recapping what you’ve learned recently? This is a great way to get started, and you can quickly build on this into having longer discussions with your team on different diseases and procedures!
So if you want to level up your nursing career, don’t be afraid to learn more, do more and discuss with your team - bring your ideas to the table and collaborate, because it’s when we all communicate and work together we, and our patients, get the best results.
There are also tons of opportunities to learn more if you want to up your knowledge and skills - and the resources I’ve shared above are only a few examples!
If you want to develop your practical skills (and your knowledge) when nursing different medical patients, I’ve created a range of resources designed to do just this! The VIMN Pocket Guide series contains different downloadable and physical guides to managing various diseases, including practical skills, clinical knowledge, anaesthesia and procedure considerations, nursing care and more!
I am so excited to announce that three new guides are joining the family on November 15th - and you can get your hands on them in the store! So if you want to up your skills with medical maths, renal, respiratory, GI, endocrine or haematology patients, you can pick up a copy here.
How are you going to up-level your career? DM me on Instagram and let me know!
