Acute Care Nurses: Salary, Job Description, How To Become One, and Quiz

Job description

Acute Care Nurses provide advanced nursing care for patients with acute conditions such as heart attacks, respiratory distress syndrome, or shock. May care for pre- and post-operative patients or perform advanced, invasive diagnostic or therapeutic procedures.

• Perform emergency medical procedures, such as basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), and other condition-stabilizing interventions.
• Manage patients’ pain relief and sedation by providing pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions, monitoring patients’ responses, and changing care plans accordingly.
• Document data related to patients’ care, including assessment results, interventions, medications, patient responses, or treatment changes.
• Diagnose acute or chronic conditions that could result in rapid physiological deterioration or life-threatening instability.

Salary

Acute Care Nurses with little to no experience tend to make between $50800 and $58770 while the more experienced ones can earn over $88350 per year.

One of the easiest ways to increase your salary as an Acute Care Nurse is to move to a higher paying state like CA. Right now, the highest paying states for Acute Care Nurses are CA, HI, DC, MA and OR.

However, a higher pay at CA doesn’t guarantee that you will make more because the living expenses at CA might be twice as high than where you are currently at now.

Three other factors that can increase your salary as an Acute Care Nurse is the degree you hold, the industry you work in, and lastly the company you work for.

Requirements

We asked other Acute Care Nurses what degree they had when they got the job and most of them said they had an Associate’s Degree followed by a Bachelor’s Degree.

Other than that, we also asked them what did they major in and here are the most popular majors that came up.

Pros and Cons

Here are some of the pros and cons of being an Acute Care Nurse.

What is the job like

74% of Acute Care Nurses said they were satisfied with their job and 82% said they feel like their job is making other people’s lives better.

Is this right for me

You can read more about these career personality types here.

People who are suitable for this job tends to like working with, communicating with, and teaching people. They like helping or providing service to others..

They also like working with ideas, and require an extensive amount of thinking. They like searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally.

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