Nursing Pays
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts that the registered nurse (RN) will be the fastest growing profession between 2008 and 2018. And the profession is financially rewarding. The BLS estimates that the average salary for a registered nurse in 2010 was $67,720, or $32.56 an hour. In 2009 the average salary was $63,750, or $30.65 per hour. That’s about a 6 percent increase in a bad economy when millions of Americans were just thankful to have a job.
However, as in all professions, some segments do better than others. A recent survey of 3,000 nurse practitioners conducted by “Advance for NPs and PAs” found full-timers earned $90,770 in 2010. But nurse practitioners in emergency departments earned on average $104,549. Good salaries considering that Medscape reports that nearly half of family physicians, with all their additional training and educational expenses, made between $100,000 and $175,000 in 2010.
See full Merrill Matthews post at The Health Care Blog.
And the nurses don’t have the expense of malpractice insurance that so deeply gouges the docs.
It seems to pay very well.
The proliferation of robotics in medicine over the next few generations may change the rate of salary increases for nurses.
Demand for medical technicians may be higher.
RNs do pretty well but nursing assistants have a low-paying job that most people would not want.
Assuming that demand for health care continues to rise, and also assuming that the government doesn’t limit medical R&D more than it already does, I don’t see nurses maintaining their current role in the near future. As Lizzy hinted above, technology is slowly replacing workers in the health sector as entrepreneurs see the money to be made. The number of machines in a standard patient room has increased so much in only a few years – I don’t forsee this trend changing a great deal.