[...] there's a 15 state nursing consortium which recognizes other nurses licences. Most 'big states' do not allow other nurses to operate in their states.
Now that official
nursing licenses, which are not the same as
nursing certifications, have been brought into the discussion, I've decided that having been clueless about the initials that I've seen on numerous medical-i.d. badges in recent years, it's past time for me to finally learn the standard nursing ranks or levels of formal licensing and certification. So I'm offering what I've found tonight. It's in ascending order of training, thus presumably also of knowledge & skill (but only by relying on what I assume is a credible source [
#]):
•
Nursing Assistants (NA), who hold not only no license, but apparently also no certification;
•
Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA), who hold only a training certification, but no license;
•
Licensed Practical Nurses a.k.a.
Licensed Vocational Nurses (LPN | LVN), which is the
lowest level holding a
nursing license;
•
Registered Nurses;
•
Advanced-Practice Registered Nurses, who includes ARNP (more-or-less reshuffling of the words),
Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNM), and
Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNA).
•
Doctors of Nursing Practice (DNP), which is a nonphysician doctorate.
Inexperienced patients might be inclined to dismiss
NAs and
CNAs as mere
go-fers, but their perspective might change more favorably when they're too healthy to see much of their assigned nurses, who are busy caring for patients who are worse off. It's my impression that it's the NAs and CNAs who are relied upon to free nurses from performing some necessary but really disagreeable tasks for patients, notably those involving
bed-pans, for which patients are not at all keen on delays.
-------
Note
#: <
https://www.nursingschoolhub.com/nurse-rankings/>. Beware that this site does have commercial aspects, altho' I'm unconvinced that it matters for my purposes. But does anyone remember that the elegant word for an assistant is properly spelled "aid
e"? Without the ‘E’, it's merely a broad synonym for "help".