Some people view nursing as a complex science. Others view it as an art. The fact is, nursing has many aspects and they all require a lot of skills and knowledge. One aspect of nursing is the neonatal challenge. Caring for young children (neonates) has never been easy, considering how helpless young children are. It’s a difficult job, for sure, but also a highly rewarding one that will leave you with a satisfied feeling when you go home after a long day’s work.
If you’re going to be caring for children professionally, you’ll have to make sure you got the skills to do this right. Rearing a young child and thereby shaping its future for the rest of his/her life is no small feat. It will take some serious responsibility from you, amongst many other things.
So what exactly will it take to become a good neonatal nurse ?
Neonatal Nurse Requirements
Degree
It certainly helps to have a degree in nursing. Pretty much all neonatal nurses have one. When a nurse has a degree, it guarantees that she’s been trained in order to handle babies and knows how to do this well enough that her care will be beneficial to the child. A good neonatal nurse will know how to calculate dosages of medication according to the bodyweight of your baby, and other such things.
Neonatal nurses should also keep their knowledge up to date by attending conferences and workshops. If you are smart, you’ll build up your resume and make your neonatal skills look more and more impressive with each passing year. People will be looking at your degrees and experience.
Patience
When you are working with young children, you are going to have to have a lot of patience. Since young people’s brains aren’t very well developed yet, you can expect them to routinely ignore or misunderstand your expressed desires.
Babies are even worse, since they can’t understand you yet. And even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to do anything much, except for flailing their extremities in every which way possible. Babies can’t tell you what’s wrong. It can sometimes take time to figure the puzzle out.
Experience
If you have a lot of experience taking care of babies, then you’ve already got a leg up on other neonatal nurses that lack this experience. Over many years, you can hone your skills and become better at your work. This experience can add up in figuring out what it really is that a child needs at some point. It can save you lots of time when it comes to child care.
Referrals
If you’ve got experience, then you’ve probably also got referrals: people you’ve worked with, who know what you’ve done, professionally, and are willing to vouch for you when it comes to your abilities as a neonatal nurse.
It’s a great idea to check with your colleagues if they are willing to become your referral in case they ever become your ex-colleagues. That way you’ll know up front whether it’s okay to give them out as a referral to a new employer. A person who has said yes to becoming your referral, is unlikely to say something not so nice about you. A few good referrals can help a lot.
Interview
If you are going in for an interview in order to score a neonatal nursing job somewhere, then you have to realize that you are going to be screened for your personality as well. The resume and the referrals are merely your entry tickets.
Once you’ve actually managed to get yourself inside, you’ll likely have to prove that you are capable of dealing with infants well. They very well might have a baby on display for you to react to. If the reaction is positive, there’s a good chance you’ll be accepted as its neonatal nurse.
It helps to have a natural affection for young children, because then you don’t have to fake it. But then again, you probably do, otherwise you would not have taken the time to study for becoming a neonatal nurse with a degree.
Conclusion
As a neonatal nurse, you perform one of the most important duties in the history of mankind: to make sure that our young children grow up to become the next generation in our future.
Becoming a neonatal nurse isn’t easy, but it isn’t rocket science either. Pretty much anybody can learn how to do the job well, given that enough time is invested in practicing all the best care tactics with infants.
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