Yeah. . . .no. I'm having some thoughts about BSNs.

I'm an ADN-prepared nurse. Those of you who've been here for a while know that I often refer to those two years (three, actually, counting prerequisites) as the Hardest Work I Ever Put In For An Extended Period of Time. It was like drinking from a firehose, like trying to cross a raging river while wearing combat boots, like riding a bull with no previous experience. And the instructors I had hammered one thing home over and over: that we, as front-line nurses, had the right and the responsibility to consider ourselves colleagues of our BSN or MD or PA coworkers, not as helpers or assistants.Of course, that was in the days of The Nursing Shortage. ADNs like me were being fought over by multiple hospitals. Nobody in my class started work at a nursing home; we all got acute-care or better jobs right off the bat.Now my facility is going for Magnet status, which means BSNs are the basic standard of nursing education. And I have some problems with that.First, I've seen a massive drop-off in terms of the diversity of our nursing staff. Used to be, Manglement would hire people with ADNs, provided they had either a bachelor's degree in something--anything--or equivalent experience not related to nursing. As a result, I got hired with a man who'd worked as a hospital chaplain for ten years, a woman who'd been in the Navy for a decade, three people from three different African countries, and a guy who'd been a medic in the first Gulf War (1990's) and had worked as a mechanical engineer...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nurses Authors: Source Type: blogs