Neonatal nurse practitioners work with babies who have been dealt a bad hand. Their patients have usually only been in the world for a matter of minutes before experiencing their first healthcare crisis.
Premature births and other major complications make up the majority of their cases. This, naturally, creates a very high-risk work environment. All nurses encounter human suffering. All nurses lose patients. But when those patients are babies, it feels different.
Still, for the right person, this work is truly heroic, serving as an important resource to grieving parents.
What is a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner?
Nurse practitioners are nurses who have gone to graduate school to specialize in a specific healthcare discipline. In this case—neonatal care. The process is naturally strenuous—typically requiring seven years of college education when combined with undergraduate studies.
However, the work is very rewarding. People become nurse practitioners because:
- They get to focus on aspects of medicine that they love the most. Where standard RN might be more generalized in the care that they provide, nurse practitioners really get to focus on what interests them.
- They have greater autonomy. If you enjoy being a nurse, but don’t love getting told what to do all the time, becoming an NP might be the right fit for you. You’ll still get bossed around some, of course, but you will have more freedom as well. However, in between being told what to do, you will have the opportunity to make diagnoses, write prescriptions, and perform unsupervised consultations.
- Get paid more. Nurses certainly are not in it for the money, but who will say no to a raise? Nurse practitioners generally earn in the six-figure range, which is an impressive upgrade compared to most nurses’ salary expectations.
If you are interested in becoming a nurse practitioner but don’t know where to begin, consider getting some experience with the discipline that you are interested in. This will help inform the direction you want to take your degree.
How Neonatal Nurses Bridge the Gap Between Medical Care and Parental Support
Have you ever had to have a prolonged interaction with the healthcare system? If so, you know that the concept of “bedside care,” is often lost on doctors, who might be seeing upwards of sixty people a day.
What happens more often than not is something like this— you get five minutes max with the person administering your care. Usually, they are polite but efficient. They do offer comfort or support. They do not stay in your room even a second longer than they have to.
Nurses are generally more available than doctors, but they are also busy. After a day or two in the hospital, you naturally begin to wonder if anyone there has time for you at all. It will turn out, soon enough, that the billing department does— but that’s another story.
Adults can generally handle this kind of care. Children— grieving parents— cannot. People who have just met their child, only to be confronted with the fact that they may soon lose them often have more questions and concerns than the standard healthcare system is typically able to provide.
Neonatal nurse practitioners need to be able to handle these interactions with an exceptional degree of sensitivity and patience.
Families in the neonatal ward will probably ask more questions than those on other hospital floors. As a neonatal nurse practitioner, your job will be to answer those questions with great detail and empathy.
Keep in mind that these interactions will not always be rational. They will not always be productive in a strictly medical sense. However, they are part of the process. While your patient is technically the child you will wind up treating the entire family, not medically but emotionally. You are their outlet for understanding the situation they have entered. This is a great responsibility that no amount of education can adequately prepare you for.
Are you up for the task? We might have made the world of neonatal medicine sound unappealing. In a sense, that is appropriate, isn’t it? This is serious stuff, not a walk in the park. But there is a second side that warrants consideration.
Babies get sick whether you are there or not. As a neonatal nurse practitioner, you will experience a lot of losses. However, you will also get wins—babies that grow into adults because of your intervention.
These moments make it all worthwhile. Neonatal nurse practitioners definitely need to be tougher than other healthcare professionals— no small statement to be sure— but the work they do is so rewarding—for them and the people they serve.
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