Hey everyone,
In this video I am going to talk about the nurse practitioner career field and
share my thoughts on whether I think being a nurse practitioner is worth it
compared to bedside nursing.
(Intro)
In this channel I aim to provide more information about the nursing
profession and share my nursing knowledge to help others.
If that interests you please consider subscribing and giving this video a
thumbs up.
I would greatly appreciate that.
Alright so being a nurse practitioner requires extra 2-3 years of training on
top of your bachelors and typically requires you to leave work and go back to
school full time.
So the question is, is it actually worth being a nurse practitioner financially
and from a work environment perspective.
I personally think that being a nurse practitioner is 100% worth the time as I
do not consider finances the ONLY important factor in choosing this
profession.
However I will say that this is just my opinion and that it also depends on
where you are working in terms of city, state or province.
So typically education will cost upwards of 20 - 30 thousand dollars and that
is just tuition.
You also have to consider that if you are working as a RN full time you are
losing that salary as well as the experience that could increase your salary
too.
To give you an example, I work in British Columbia and this has a wage grid
of how much a nurse makes with the year of experience they have and as you
can see the more years you are working full time as a nurse the higher your
salary gets.
For this example let's say nurse practitioner school takes 2 years to complete
and to be more realistic let's say you have 3 years of full time working
experience as a registered nurse.
So if we look down at level 3 salary in the 3rd year that is how much you
would get paid with 3 years of experience as a bedside nurse.
Now lets calculate the opportunity cost, which is the amount you would gain
in the 4th and 5th year where you would be in school as a nurse practitioner.
So at year 3 you would be making 38.26 in 2020, but by 2021 you would be
making 40.41 as your wage would increase because of experience but also
inflation would be considered so you actually can't use one table to predict
how much you would make.
So in conclusion you would be making:
Year 1: $38.26/hr * 1950 = 74607
1950 is the amount of hours a nurse works approximately in a year full time
which is basically 37.5 hours a week.
This also does not also include differentials as it would just be way too
complicated to calculate.
Also, keep in mind guys that this without ANY overtime shifts so this is a
VERY conservative number.
I can tell you from my year of experience that you easily make more than this,
but for the sake of this video let's be conservative.
So as a registered nurse working full time you will be conservatively making
74 - 78 thousand dollars a year minimum.
So let's take the average of that and say 76000 a year times two which would
be 152000 dollars of income lost if you went to nurse practitioner school as
well as 20 - 30 thousand dollars a year on top of that for tuition.
For the sake of this video let's say that NP school is 2 years and your tuition
is going to cost 20,000 dollars.
In total, your expenses at the end of 2 years considering missed pay is going
to be: 20,000 dollars plus 76,000 dollars times two years of NP school so in
total it will be 172,000 dollars.
So now lets see how much you make as a NP after the two years of NP
school.
In british columbia according to payscale.com and glassdoor.com you would
make approximately 100,000 with the upwards maximum of 140,000.
Links will be in the description below if you want to check those sources out.
So now let's consider the maximum you make working full time without
differentials as a registered nurse.
So currently in 2020, you make 46$ an hour working as a nurse in your 9th
year which is the maximum you can get hourly.
So say you make 46$ an hour, that would mean you make 89,700$ maximum.
Whereas as a nurse practitioner you make 100,000 starting.
But in this comparison since we are assuming you have 3 years of nursing
experience prior to NP school, we are comparing our 3 years of RN
experience plus the 2 years that it takes for NP school that would increase
our salary.
So we should compare our 5th year working salary with the starting salary for
NP school.
In the fifth year of bedside nursing, our salary would be 41$ an hour which
equals to 80,000 dollars.
As a starting NP, we discussed our starting salary would be 100,000 dollars.
So you make 20,000 dollars more a year as a NP.
Therefore, in conclusion in terms of finances, to be a NP, you would have to
pay the 20,000 of JUST tuition fees.
You would lose the salary you would be making as a RN for 2 years totalling
152,000 dollars.
As a registered nurse you would be making 80,000 dollars a year without
differentials by your 5th year.
As a NP you would be making 100,000 dollars a year just coming out of
school.
So now to see if it is worth it, lets compare how many years it would take to
make the 172,000 dollars that we would have kept if we stayed a registered
nurse.
The difference in income approximately 20,000 dollars a year from your fifth
year of nursing compared to being a new grad NP.
So lets say 20,000 is how much you are paying towards your 172,000 each
year. 172000 divided by 20000 would be 8.6.
So essentially it would take you 8.6 years in order for the difference of
increase in salary to make up for the time lost working for school.
Overall, this means that being a NP in this example is worth it financially but
this is an estimate that does not portray the realities as it doesn't consider
many different factors.
It doesn't consider working overtime as a RN and differentials which would
EASILY give the RN an extra income if they wanted.
It also does not consider that many people have to take out loans to pay for
NP school which means that you also have to pay interest that accrues as
you pay for it.
It doesn't consider that the RN job has one of the best unions in the nation
and has extensive benefits, and standardizes the way of giving vacation.
There are also many things that I did not talk about like work life balance as a
NP and RN and the overall job experience.
But we can talk about that in a later video.
With all that being considered, I do not believe being a NP is worth it in terms
of finances because you can easily make more by working as a RN.
However, that is not the only reason to consider being a NP, like I mentioned,
there is a higher level of education that you gain when you are a NP which
will enable you to provide greater levels of care to someone.
Some may argue that this is actually a bad thing as they have more
responsibility but in my honest opinion, it provides me with happiness and I
am grateful for it.
Anyways, this is just my thoughts and opinions.
I would love to hear what you think about this age old debate of RN vs NP.
https://www.payscale.com/res earch/CA/Job=Nurse_Practiti