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Helping Nurses Succeed
Hello Nurses!
I love helping other nurses and nursing students succeed! I am a second-career nurse. I went to nursing school when my twin daughters were 3 years old. It was one of the most stressful times in my life.
Nursing school is no joke, we ALL know that! However, it was totally worth it. Nursing is so diverse, there are so many career paths you can take. If you’re a person who likes constant change and you loathe monotony nursing is right for you! If you have questions about nursing as a career path check out my blog post Want to Become a Nurse? Which Path to Nursing is Right for You? I want to tell you about the resources that helped me through nursing school.
Is There Anything Harder Than Nursing School?
In my third semester of nursing school, I had a lot going on in my life. My daughters were 4 years old, I was working part-time and my marriage and bank account were crumbling. I do my own taxes every year, and I like to look at our old tax returns to remind me where we came from. That year we were bringing in $40,000 a year for a family of four. I look at that income now and think how did we do that? We made too much to be on food stamps, thankfully we could still take advantage of WIC. We were living paycheck to paycheck and often in the negative.
Is There Anything Worse Than Failing?
To top it all off I ended up failing my third semester of nursing school. I was horrible at test-taking. I noticed there were nursing students in my class who were so good at test-taking. I grew up most of my life thinking I was just stupid, and that school is just not something I’m good at. But, as I observed other people in my class I realized that they learned test-taking strategies, whether it was something natural for them or something they learned over a period of time. I had to figure out what they learned. No one was going to help me do that, I had to search for the answers on my own.
So What Helped??
In my research, I came across Simple Nursing. Mike Linares is the founder and CEO and his videos helped me through the worst of nursing school. Check out the abundance of resources he offers. Watching his videos gave me hope.
UWorld is another resource that helped me! It is a test prep quiz bank for the NCLEX. I loved using UWorld because it had questions, images, and diagrams that helped me make sense of each rationale. I’ve also used NCLEX Mastery and in my opinion, UWorld wins hands down. When I took the NCLEX I could not believe how much it looked like the UWorld platform.
My advice is to purchase UWorld in your first year of nursing school. Use it all through nursing school to help you with your nursing exams. The same with Simple Nursing. Mike has so many free YouTube videos. Take advantage of them in your FIRST semester!
I WISH someone told me that! I didn’t find out about UWorld until my last semester of nursing school from a professor at a different university than I was attending. To me, that’s just mean! Everyone should know about this platform. So that’s why I’m telling you!
We need to start creating a culture in nursing of lifting each other up and helping each other to succeed.
Speaking of Helping Nurses Succeed...
I want to highlight these nursing products that are made by NURSES and for NURSES! As I mentioned before nursing is diverse. It’s not just about the bedside. Some nurses get tired of picking up extra shifts to make ends meet, go on vacation, take our kids to a water park, or allow them to be in a sport or art they love. These nurses are thinking outside the box and are filling a need. I hope this inspires you and motivates you to potentially do the same, whatever that may look like.
Products Made by Nurses
Taylor Made Scrub Hats is a nurse-founded & nurse-led healthcare apparel brand dedicated to empowering medical professionals. They make a variety of scrub hats, headbands, and mask magnets. You can even make a custom order.
KimKaps was founded by an OR nurse. Her mom is a seamstress. The two of them paired up and they now have 10 different style scrubhats to choose from! They also sell denim jackets, T-shirts, sweatshirts, Headbands, Mask Snaps, Custom Tumblers and Jewelry.
Products Made for Nurses
Nurse Yard was founded by Jonathan. His sister—an RN in Phoenix, Arizona—struggled with leg pain, swelling, and itchy feet after her long shifts at the hospital. With the help of his sister and some other nurses, Jonathan managed to create compression sock 100% fit for nurses! They have helped over 150,000+ healthcare workers in the last 3 years and growing. Their mission is to help healthcare heroes like yourself work and come home pain-free — so that you can focus on saving lives without any distractions!
Clove Shoes was founded by Joe Ammon whose wife is a nurse. He witnessed how taxing nursing can be as he watched his wife go through nursing school, land her first job, and lose her first patient. At Clove their mission is simple: to take care of those who take care of others. SuperCush is back in stock! ↓
So when we were designing CLOVE we identified a Japanese fabric called Clarino, it’s a synthetic leather which makes it impervious to fluids, it’s completely waterproof, and you can clean with whatever kind of wipe.
How I Started Working From Home As a Nurse
I started in the nursing field in 2014 as a nursing assistant. My twin daughters were two years old and I worked the night shift while attending nursing school. In 2017 I became an RN and worked in adult intermediate care. One year later I transitioned to the NICU.
In early 2020, my husband and I received a forgotten credit card bill in the mail. We were just starting to dig ourselves out of the financial hole we created when our daughters were born. In the famous words of Dave Ramsey, I had reached the point of being sick and tired of being sick and tired! Can you relate? I marched into the house, put the bill on the counter, looked at my husband, and told him I was taking a travel assignment.
Time To Travel
I contacted Aya Healthcare and I was set to start my travel assignment at the beginning of March 2020 at Dayton Children’s Hospital in their NICU. I already worked part-time at Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital (NICU) in Cleveland, Ohio. I worked three days a week in Dayton, Ohio, and two days a week in Cleveland, Ohio which are 4.5 hours apart. I worked the night shift at both hospitals. It was rough.
Then, as we all know, COVID hit. Suddenly my husband was working from home. My daughters were nine and had to be home-schooled because their school shut down. And I was working 54 hours a week, traveling 4.5 hours between jobs, working nights, exhausted, and wanting to be home with my family. I did this for six weeks until my assignment was cut short due to COVID.
For nine years I watched everyone around me take care of my daughters; my parents and my in-laws. I was working hard with the end goal of being able to spend more time at home with my family. When COVID hit I had enough. I needed to be at home. That’s when I started to searching for nursing jobs from home.
Determined to WFH
A friend from church worked as a nurse for Ensemble Health Partners. I applied to several positions and even with his referral, I was unable to get an interview. I knew someone else from church who worked for Anthem who was more than willing to help me. I applied to several positions and had two interviews. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. At the time I was working at another NICU closer to home and I was very unhappy. The unit’s standards of care were not very high and the nurses were not welcoming at all. I was lonely and felt like I was always going to work with my fists up.
My husband’s coworker’s wife worked for Cigna. She allowed me to use her as a referral and they contacted me the day after I applied. It wasn’t until September of 2021 that I finally landed a job from home as a Utilization Review Nurse with eviCore/Cigna! I couldn’t believe it. Working from home seemed like a dream.
Most nurses would scoff at me when I told them I was trying to get a job from home. They told me I had to be a case manager, or that those jobs were impossible to get. But I never stopped trying. My dad taught me that for every ten interviews, if you get one job you’ve done well. So I kept trying and interviewing and it paid off.
Hard Work Pays Off
Now I work day shift for the first time in my life. I started with the 10:00 am – 6:30 pm shift and in six months I jumped to 7:00 am – 3:30 pm. No weekends, no holidays! No more putting in for PTO six weeks in advance only to get rejected because of seniority or staffing issues. Most importantly, I get to be home with my family. I get to take my daughters to school and hug them when they get off the bus. I get to be home with them when their sick and they get to rest in their own beds. I don’t have to worry about arranging for someone to pick them up and stay the night because I’m working.
If you’re a nurse working bedside and you long for this, I want to help you. With perseverance, you too can work from home. I know you’re every bit as capable of persevering as I was because we’re nurses…that’s what we do.
How Can I Help?
There are many jobs at Centene Corporation , Humana, Cigna, and CVS right now! Check them out! Just type in Nurse in the search bar and you’ll be able to filter for remote jobs from there.
Many companies are still very active on LinkedIn. I reinstated my LinkedIn profile two years ago while taking a nurse writing course, and that is where writers get a lot of their leads. In the writing world, LinkedIn is where it’s at!
I learned how to build out my LinkedIn profile in the nurse writing course, and after I finished building out my profile and placed the Open To Work sign on my profile picture I had Utilization Review companies reach out to me for interviews. The Open To Work sign was for nurse writing jobs, and I’m very content with the Utilization Review job I have now, so I had to keep turning companies down. That was proof to me that this method works.
Feel free to view my profile here for reference.
I suggest making a profile on LinkedIn and taking the time to build your profile. Add a profile picture, click on Frames and you can add Open to Work, and a background picture. Fill out each section the best that you can.
Click on the Jobs tab at the top and start searching! Connect with other remote nurses and start networking. There are so many different companies that hire remote nurses. I started as a Utilization Review Nurse/Nurse Reviewer and soon I will start as a Nurse Auditor. You can do it!