Five Things Nurses Are Really Good At – And Sometimes Better Than Doctors
From here
Nurses do many things that only doctors used to do. And they do them very well. You may be worried if you meet a nurse when you expect to see a doctor. But you shouldn’t be.
The reasons nurses do doctors’ jobs is due to a shortage of doctors and advances in medicine and surgery. Doctors and surgeons can do things that are more complex than in the past. People live longer and more people need to see a doctor these days. Doctors take on new jobs and leave some behind. And some of the jobs they leave behind are picked up by nurses.
The jobs nurses do range from very specific procedures to general ones. The specific jobs include some invasive procedures, these are ones where something may be inserted into your body either to look for something or to remove something. The general jobs include running their own clinics.
Here are five examples of the things nurses do particularly well:
Getting things out of children’s ears
Children have a habit of putting small toys in their ears. Once something is in there it can be very hard to get out. The worst thing parents can do is try to remove the object because they often end up pushing it even further into the ear. At this point, the parent usually ends up taking the child to A&E to have the foreign object removed by a healthcare professional.
A study comparing nurses with doctors found that nurses had a more than 90% success rate in removing objects from children’s ears, compared with senior doctors who were only successful in 15.4% of cases, and junior doctors (7.7%). A very good result for nurses.
Diagnosing illness
Doctors spend years learning the myriad things that can go wrong with the human body, but are they any better at diagnosing problems than nurses? One study used complex case studies to compare the diagnostic skills of doctors and nurses. Not only were the participants asked to diagnose the illness, they also had to suggest a treatment. The researchers found that there was no statistically significant difference between nurses and doctors.
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