Nursing is both an art and a science. In fact, the American Nurses Association (ANA) defined it as “nursing is the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, communities and populations.”

These days, there are more than 2 million in the work force that functions as a nurse. Usually, most people think that nurses are only the doctor’s assistant since they work closely with physicians, carry out their orders, check the patient’s vital sign and keep them alive while the doctor is away. That notion is true however; nurses have other alternative jobs aside from that. For instance, nurses can be pharmacy technicians, or they can be on sales selling pharmaceutical products. The person doesn’t need to take the exams required to pharmacy technician nor study the different pharmaceutical products. Primarily their job is to fill up prescription requests or receive the prescriptions given by the doctors, the hospital, and the nurse or even from the patients.

There are many tasks involved and the pharmacy technician should pay attention and concentrate on the task because a mistake can cause the life of the patient. Aside from receiving the prescriptions, he or she should also measure and count the medications needed. In some cases wherein the medicine should be prepare, the technician should mix the medications and select the container that is properly suited for the medications. Labeling should be done so as not to create confusion especially to patients who are not confined in the hospital.

There are also other duties and responsibilities a pharmacy technician should do. These include maintaining and updating the client’s profile, preparing their insurance forms, doing inventory of the drugs especially the over-the-counter medicines, doing cash registrations and most of all, updating themselves with the new medicines in the market, knowing their side effects and the availability of these drugs.

Apart from that, there are other opportunities a nurse can do. They can be in the academy and teach nurse hopefuls. This is a noble profession since they are the ones who will hone the skills and abilities of future nurses. They will expose the students to what the job description of nurses are really and at the same time assist them in the whole clinical exposure.

Another alternative profession is to do research and nursing informatics. Although not all nurses would do this because of the time and effort to research and study, in the long run, they can help their colleagues improve their job and help alleviate the sufferings of the patient by the methods they discovered.

Traveling and being a nurse can also go hand in hand. What these traveling nurses usually do is that they help transport patient from one place to another and make sure they are as stable as possible in the duration of the flight. This job is not commonly offered to ordinary nurses. Emergency training or basic life support and even stroke training is required since most patients transferred have emergent situations.