My name is Stefan and I am a Registered Nurse. You can find me on twitter as @StefanTheNurse.
I’ve been a Registered Nurse for the past 16-odd years, though some skills I gained well before then. I’ve worked in both Private and Public Hospitals.
Over time I have been an Army medic (in the Reserves), an AIN, an Aged Care Nurse, and a Scout/Scrub nurse in Operating Theatres, but the focus of my career has been in the specialties of Anaesthetics and Recovery Room Nursing and Intensive Care Nursing. Lately I’ve been working with nursing students in ICU.
I have a Graduate Certificate in Nursing (Intensive Care) from QUT and a Graduate Certificate in Nursing (Anaesthetics and Recovery Room Nursing) from UTS.
My colleagues tell me that my view of the world seems slightly…different
StefanTheNurse 
Just found your blog – pretty interesting to read. Thanx.
Im a danish nurse and thinking about trying out nursing a new strange place. Anywhere you can recommend with all your experience?
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Do you mean location or speciality?
As you probably know, nursing is a broad field… so it really depends on what you think you will be able to bear for a period of study/familiarisation, and then shift work and forty hours a week!!!
Have a think about what kind of area/patients you can cope with at 3am…
In my own case, working in theatre initially meant 2.5 years of four nights in seven “on-call” – waiting ten minutes from the hospital for something to happen. I lived an hour away, so I lived at work those nights.
Then followed a period of 5 or so years doing less on-call work (but it never went away – it just meant you finished everyone else’s theatre lists and then did the emergency work until the board cleared) – late shift finished at 9 o’clock and between 9 and 7 the next day the on call staff covered operations as required. I have had shifts start at 7 am and finish at 1 am (with the potential to come back until 7 am) and others start at 1 pm and finish at 5 am. I even worked on weekend where from Friday night until Monday morning we came in every 3-4 hrs for 3 hrs to perform caesarean sections for I wish I could remember how many babies…and I lived half an hour away!
Unlike in theatre the last eight years have involved working up to 12 hour shifts…but a least I know when I’ll go home.
We could make a number of unhelpful generalisations about the types of people who gravitate to particular specialist areas of nursing, but really, it boils down to “what do you think you can do at 3am???”
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