Long-term care an excellent place to hone nursing skills
Assessment skills, quick thinking and leadership all a part of working in long-term care
Wednesday April 9, 2008 -- Deron Hamel
Any nurse can work in a hospital but not every nurse can work in a long-term care home. These were the words a former director of care (DOC) at Springdale Country Manor once told Maureen Imamovic and other nurses at the Peterborough long-term care home.

For Imamovic, who is now Springdale’s administrator and DOC, those words still ring true. Nurses working in long-term care, she notes, gain skills and knowledge which will likely not be attained working in acute care.

Nurses working in long-term care mostly work on their own. Because long-term care requires frontline staff to be largely independent nurses acquire excellent assessment skills, learn to think quickly and develop a strong intuition, which Imamovic characterizes as a “sixth sense.”

“If you want amazing assessment skills, you ask a long-term care nurse, because we don’t have the back-up of hospitals and we don’t have the back-up of other departments and specialists,” she says.

“The skills that I have are skills nurses who have never worked in long-term care (will not have). Those aren’t skills that I could teach them. Those are skills that I’ve acquired from 16 years of long-term care experience.”

Imamovic says the strong assessment skills nurses working in long-term care develop are largely a result of the fact that nurses get to “know each resident intimately well.” This level of personalization fosters intuition which Imamovic says cannot be taught.

Another benefit of working in long-term care over acute care is that long-term care offers more opportunities for internal promotion — a cornerstone of OMNI’s hiring practices.

“Nurses in long-term care are managers, they have leadership skills that other specialists in nursing do not have, because when you are here you are the leader in the home,” says Imamovic. “As a nurse I have excellent leadership skills that I can attribute to my experience working here on the floor.”

Long-term care is also quite advanced in technology, notes Imamovic. Wound care and wound prevention, she adds, exemplify areas of nursing where long-term care has been on the cutting edge for a number of years.

Sarah Hillman, a registered practical nurse at Springdale, says she chose to pursue a career in long-term care because of the “community feeling” that comes with long-term care.

In a long-term care home staff members get to know each resident on a personal level, whereas in acute care patients come and go constantly. Like Imamovic, Hillman, who graduated from Sir Sandford Fleming College in June 2007, says the fact that long-term care nurses acquire excellent assessment skills helped draw her to the sector.

“Being around the residents a lot more often you get to know they’re daily routines and what they’re generally like from day to day, so you can notice when something — even if it’s minor — is a bit different,” she says.

How has working in long-term care improved your job skills? If you have a story you’d like to share about working in long-term care, please contact deron(at)axiomnews.ca.

If you have feedback on this story, please call the newsroom at (800) 294-0051 or e-mail deron(at)axiomnews.ca.