Course Detail: HLT125 - Explore a Career in Nursing - NEW!
Are you interested in a career that's meaningful and challenging with a great salary, benefits, and opportunities for advancement? You should think about becoming a nurse!
No segment of the economy is growing faster than the healthcare industry, and nurses have more options than ever before. As you progress through the course, you'll learn about several different fields of nursing-from traditional bedside work to critical care areas, like the OR and ICU, to lesser known branches of the field, like nursing informatics. Basically, there's a nursing specialty for everyone, whether your dream is an adrenaline-fueled job in a fast-paced emergency department or a desk job working for the government.
You'll also gain information about what you can do with a graduate degree in nursing, and take a quick peek at some of the other medical positions you might be interested in, like radiology technician or physical therapist. If you've ever thought about nursing, now is the time to find out more!
The Lessons
- So You Want to Be a Nurse - Discover some of the many benefits of becoming a nurse. Review the different pathways to getting a nursing diploma or degree, and then you'll look at the pros and cons of each. It will also talk about some things to think about before you seriously consider nursing school, like prerequisite classes and some of the skills that can help set you up for success.
- Medical Basics - Gain an overview of medical basics.
- Welcome to Nurse Training - Students will take a look at exactly what happens in nursing school, from the coursework to the clinical rotations to the exams.
- The Frontlines of Nursing - Explore the three most common job settings for new nurses - hospital acute care, outpatient clinics, and long-term care facilities. Learn about the different specialties you can pursue in each area, the colleagues you might work with, and what working as a nurse in these three areas is really like.
- Nursing for Adrenaline Junkies - Many people consider ER, OR, and ICU nursing the most exciting fields of nursing! This lesson will discuss what it's really like to work in these settings and how this compares to what you see on TV. YLearn how ERs triage patients, what it means to scrub or circulate in the OR, the different types of ICUs, and much more.
- Nursing for Therapeutic Communicators - There are certain fields in nursing that require more care and compassion than others. Explore psychiatric nursing, hospice nursing, case management, and health coaching. These are careers that focus on the counseling and patient advocacy roles of nursing.
- Nursing for Number Crunchers and Nine-To-Fivers - Learn about careers that focus on the research, education, management, and change agent roles of nursing. Explore research nursing, informatics nursing, and legal nurse consulting.
- Nursing for Those Who Want to Better Their Communities - What have you heard about community health nursing? This is a specialty that encompasses a variety of positions, from school nurses to prison nurses to Red Cross disaster relief nurses. Community health nurses engage in all six of the nursing roles, with heavy focus on education, patient advocacy, and being a change agent. You'll explore what it really means to be a community health nurse by learning where you'll work and what you might be doing.
- Nursing for Those Who Want to See the World - You'll explore everything from working as a travel nurse in a neighboring town to taking to the high seas as a member of the Navy Nurse Corps. You'll also look at medical mission work like Doctors Without Borders and Mercy Ships. If you want to use your nursing skills while seeing the world, get ready to love this lesson.
- Pediatric and Obstetric Nursing and More - No nursing survey course would be complete without touching on pediatric and obstetric nursing. Explore these specialties and then check out a few other nursing positions that involve working on a team instead of in a department.
- Advanced Practice Nursing: Beyond the Bachelor's Degree - Maybe you want to be a nurse, but you know that you'll want to do more than basic clinical nursing. You might be thinking about teaching or hospital administration. Or perhaps you want to become a nurse practitioner or nurse anesthetist. You'll look at all of those options in this lesson.
- If You're Still Not Sure - What if you've gone through this course so far and learned about nursing school and licensing exams and the different fields of nursing, but you still don't know if nursing is right for you? That's okay! This final lesson will recap the highs and lows of nursing and give you some ideas about alternatives to becoming a nurse. You'll also look at some strategies for getting more information so you can be armed with the knowledge you need to make a decision.
About the Instructor
Hilary Khouri has ten years of experience in the medical field. After college, she began her medical career working in the front office of a group practice handling daily administrative tasks. Her medical experience also includes working at a healthcare consulting firm, where she reviewed electronic health records for completeness and educated providers on documentation improvement in addition to performing risk adjustment coding. She holds a bachelor's in fashion merchandising from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is a Certified Billing and Coding Specialist (CBCS) through the University of Alabama.
