I'm gonna ruffle some feathers when I say this, but traditional nursing is dying. The traditional nursing career path is dying. A slow and painful death. And I hope to show you today in this episode why traditional nursing, deeply rooted in the industrial age and the thinking around service and delivery and skilled labour and Delivering, skills for hourly rates and that Florence Nightingale legacy is no longer something that we should be buying into because simply put it's not paying our bills and it's not sustainable in this digital era and there are so many different ways that we can leverage the changes and the transformations that are happening right now to be able to help you build a nursing career that you love That doesn't take away from why you first chose to become a nurse.

So let me talk to you about why I believe traditional nursing is dying a slow and painful death. And some could argue that it's maybe dying a faster death than what I'm saying. But we all know that the system, the healthcare system, is broken. It's sick. The healthcare system is sick. And it needs friggin nursing.

We have burnout at an all time high across nearly every Industry and specialty, professional specialty within the industry itself, physios, OTs, doctors, speech path, social workers, but in particular, we know that nurses are the most burnt out profession. We are the largest profession, but are burnt out.

Post pandemic and even pre pandemic is at an all time high, and it makes total sense given the professional traumas and the high levels of stress that we experience day in day out, we cannot be expected to deliver high quality care at a high level every single day, leveraging our skills, knowledge and experience when our nervous systems are burnt out and we are constantly operating from a state of fight or flight and stress.

We know that our early career nurses, our amazing graduate nurses, are coming into nursing because they want to help people, they want to deliver amazing care. They're following that industrial age Florence Nightingale legacy that has been laid out to us, and you know, nurses are just here to help, to serve.

But in this day and age, it's not enough. And within six months, because of the lack of support, and because of the inability for them to be able to see themselves in their career moving forward, they're leaving. They're starting to consider alternative routes and we've even labelled this online called soft nursing.

Like, what if it's just not soft nursing? What if this is the modern era of nursing? This is what a nursing career looks like. Skilled nurses from the boomer generation, they're retiring in droves. They're saying, I've done my time, I've put the time and the effort in. And they're also confused as to why early career nurses can't just stick it out.

And it always comes back to, are we just less resilient nowadays? But I think there are so many factors that are at play here around why traditional nursing is changing and why we have this, like, you know, retiring generation of nurses that are looking at early career nurses and going, well, they're just not resilient.

They just won't stick it out. Like, why can't they just get on with it? But the reality is, it's because we're no longer in the industrial age where we were taught. I remember being specifically taught, get a skill, get a labor. Like, and then you will be able to make money, but you'll be able to make just enough money, and you'll have a comfortable life.

But now, we get the skills, we get the labour, and we come into the workforce, and we're not living a comfortable life, because the cost of living is so high, and our expenses are so high, and like, having kids is so high. Everything just costs so much more. So therefore what used to work is no longer working.

And then you're an early career nurse is looking around going, well my friend that just set up a bakery, like she's making a lot of money. Or my mate that's a YouTuber that decided to just go all in on YouTube, they're making triple the amount of money I'm making. Why would I come here and bust my ass every day?

So we're starting to have this shift in perception and shift in eras around what is expected or what should be expected from our nurses. And then we know that by 2030, globally, we're expected to have a deficit of 30 million nurses. I'm not about stopping people, or taking more people out of the system.

But I come up against that criticism a lot. And the reality is do you blame people for wanting to find a different, better way to live their one and only life on this earth?

This is our only chance. This is the one time. There is no rinse and repeat and come back. Maybe there is. Who knows? Not that we know of. I'm not gonna sit here and just be happy settling for less than in a system that is making me sick, that is frustrating the shit out of me, that mentally and emotionally impacts me beyond belief, and just because Karen at work or John at work is like No, like, you can't do that, you can't take nurses from the system, then I'm just going to sit here and be quiet.

Our system is broken, and we are in dire need of a solution, and I think that building a hybrid career is one of those potential solutions. We know that nurses are entering the profession, right, to help others and make an impact and find meaning, and I was reflecting on this, and I thought to myself, But the reality is, I rarely felt like that in the system.

I rarely felt, if you're really honest with yourself, how many days do you go to work and you're like, I just made such an impact today? I mean, we do every single day. But how many times do you really feel that? Do you really let that sink in? And you leave and you're like skipping out of the unit and you've just had the best day on the earth.

Like, Nine times out of ten, it's the complete opposite because of the stresses, because of the traumas, because of the things we have to experience. And so it got me thinking about like, well, what if we can find purpose and passion as nurses and use our skills to help others and have impact beyond bedside, where every day you feel like you're genuinely helping people with the skills, knowledge and experiences that you have.

Don't even talk to me or start to talk to me about KPI systems in the healthcare system. They need systems and processes, but the reality is. A lot of the KPIs and the goals that the organisations have, they are patient centred, they're not staff centred. So therefore, we're always on the back foot, and they're leaving us with less staff every single day, and all these pressures, all these KPIs, all these documents, and all of that has stripped away our purpose.

Like, we did not become nurses to sit there and do, you know, a 50 page admission booklet. That's not why we became nurses, right? And people like you and I are starting to think things like, I didn't sign up for this. This is not why I'm here. I came here to help other people. I became a nurse because I thought it was going to make an impact.

I thought I was going to be able to use my skills, knowledge, and experience to help people in their moment of need. But I'm too busy riding a risk man because the hospital system failed us around X time. Situation. So it's totally normal, right, that we're here, like the death of nursing, the death of traditional nursing.

We are exhausted, we're frustrated with the current state of healthcare. We are being asked to do more with less every single day. Every single day. And if you're like me and you're ambitious and driven and motivated, and you see that you have one opportunity on this. big blue friggin ball floating in the universe.

You want more and you should want more. You want more freedom. You want more purpose. You want more pay. You want more balance. You want to be able to spend the time with your family. And whilst we knew what we were coming into in nursing, we did not or we could not foresee the conditions in which we exist today.

And we cannot be blamed for that. We have to start to step back and go, well, you know, what we thought we were coming into has actually evolved and changed. In this day and age, you don't have to stay and do that. You don't have to do it. You can make it work for you in a different way.

And I know that many of you are feeling like this because I get these messages every single day. I get DMs, you're sharing your struggles, you want something different, something better, but you don't believe it exists, and honestly, having helped over 500 nurses, you know, apply, interview, and land their next nursing role, I struggled sometimes to find where this exists in the system, because if I'm being really honest and authentic, I didn't find it for myself.

I tried over 15 different roles and I couldn't find it. And so I think that Whilst we can look back at the past and we can see, you know, people like Florence Nightingale revolutionising nursing, creating the foundations of modern healthcare, you know, she really leant into emphasising service, structure, bedside care, systems, processes.

It perfectly aligned with the era and the age that the economy in the world was going through at that time, the industrial age. And the thing is, the problem with that model is that whilst it transformed, Nursing in her time. It created this linear, rigid career path that we're still living in today that doesn't meet the needs of today's modern, flexible nursing workforce and then enter a couple of things, pandemic and the evolution of digital age in the digital era.

And technology and societal shifts, you know, going from playing cassettes and CDs when I was a kid to now, like, having a phone that's got thousands of songs on it, like, it's crazy to think the technological advancements and shifts that we've made even just in the last 50 years, right? Never mind 100 years.

And when we think about the evolution of nursing and why we're maybe facing the challenges that we face today, I think it's because we haven't caught up and we're not giving ourselves permission to see we are in a new age of nursing where technology and societal shifts are opening new doors. We are no longer confined by the traditional route and path that was laid out by amazing people like Florence Nightingale.

And for people that followed her, we are now in the era where we're not confined to bedside care. We can work from home. We can do things that we never thought was possible. We can coach. We can consult. We can use our skills, knowledge, and experience to create content that inspires, educates, motivates people from the comfort of our home, using the skills that nursing paid us to learn.

It's insane. And add on top of that the pandemic. The pandemic accelerated the need for us to change healthcare and for us to meet the expectations of the workforce. But the reality is the pandemic led a lot of people down the path of like, what am I doing here? Why am I here? And so that pandemic, whilst for other industries, it created immense flexibility and it introduced ideas of sustainability, for nursing it didn't.

Because we had to be there at the bedside, on the front line, sacrificing our potential health and well being for a global pandemic disease that none of us were trained for. I never learnt about pandemics at university. Not once. And so it's interesting, this disconnect, right? When I really start to look at it, I see this disconnect between what we were taught and the reality.

And how many of us see that? We join nursing, we become a nurse, and then we go, holy shit, this is not what I expected. Like, why didn't anyone teach me this? And that's what I feel like the Nursepreneur Academy podcast space is for. It's for us to open our eyes and to see that what once served us maybe no longer does serve us.

And that that's okay, and it's okay for us to explore what else could be possible. Moving forward because the reality is what's working right like it's not working right now What we have right now is not working and you should not go to work and experience psychological trauma You should not have to waste your days off recovering from nursing You should not have to be at work expected to do the work of two three four five people Right in no other industry with this fly But it's because we're still stuck in this exchanging time for money, micromanagement, politics, drama, bullying narrative that does not serve us.

And I could not fathom it for the rest of my career. And so I had to think about how can I package up my skills so that I can create something that offers immense value that also fills up my cup and stops taking from my cup that gives me The ability to use my passion and my purpose to serve people that are in need in a way that lights me up and I get paid to do it in a way that actually feels fulfilling and lines my pockets like I actually have money.

I have income and I enjoy it. Imagine that's what a hybrid nursing career is. What I think like hybrid nursing careers, I think of the future. And we're starting to see that already. We have nurses who work part time who are influencers. We have nurses who work part time but run a part time cosmetic practice, or an IV hydration practice, or you have nurses like me that transitioned out and now run a full time nurse led business.

That is what's possible within a hybrid nurse in Korea. And it, they make sense because it allows us as nurses to leverage what we have learnt. In nursing and outside of nursing, right? Because it doesn't have to be something you create in nursing. You could be a nurse that's just really passionate about nutrition and meal prepping.

And you're a gym junkie. And you could create a coaching or mentorship program around that for a specific subsection of a niche. Like, or you could be like a finance girlie. Like, you are so on point with your budget. And you have saved so much money and you've invested, you know, this money and you do this.

And you've got a property portfolio or whatever. And you want to teach other people how to do that. There is no limits with what you can do when you build a hybrid nursing career, where you work nursing and you make nursing work for you, you take on a low stress, like low impact clinical or nonclinical role to maintain your financial stability and to maintain clinical skills, and then you simultaneously build an online business or a side hustle, coaching, consulting, content creation, digital courses, maybe IV hydration cosmetics.

Something that is purposeful, that allows you to leverage the skills that you have, but is also high profit, and you're able to scale with that heaps of upfront investment. This is a career path that makes nursing optional, if you ever choose to want to leave the profession, without fully leaving the profession.

Does that make sense? So you get to dabble and build a side hassle, make extra income online, that time you were spending anyway doing overtime, and then you still get to dabble in nursing, but you kind of almost make nursing your side hassle, and you get to a point where when you build your business correctly, you're Side hustle, coaching gig, or cosmetic practice, or whatever you go down the path of makes more money than your nursing career does, and then you go, what am I doing? And there's so much evidence for this out there in the world. And why these hybrid nursing career Moves and pathways that I'm coining make complete sense is because it allows you to reduce your burnout because you get to Start having more control over your time your energy you get to heal your burnout You get to work on your nervous system and you get to indulge in What I don't think a lot of people talk about when they build a business is that there's a lot of aspects of creativity and play And there's a lot of evidence around creativity and play actually impacting your healing and your burnout recovery, like in a positive way.

So one of the core foundations of nervous system healing is actually creativity and play. In nursing, we don't have time to be creative. We don't have time to play. We might have a joke and a giggle, but you can factor this into building a hybrid nursing career where when you have a business, you're actually being playful by creating content.

Creating assets and you're being creative and you're flexing that creativity that in nursing kind of like just dies a slow and painful death. Another reason why it makes sense is because it's going to offer you financial freedom beyond the bedside, like beyond what you could ever imagine, right? And it's going to allow you to pursue passions that you never thought you could actually pursue, you know like for example when I was working in the system I had no time to go and do the things that I actually enjoy doing in my own time, which was just hilarious because I was so fatigued, so burnt out, so worn out.

So things like, I used to love singing and taking piano lessons and being in theatre groups and singing in choirs, like, I didn't have space for that. So it allows you to go, I'm making the money in my business, I'm supplementing my nursing career income, I'm dwindling down the hours there, I'm becoming part time maybe like even 0.

2, 0. 3, I'm just dabbling there. And I'm also now have time for my passions and for my hobbies and for my friends, my family, and I get to work on my terms and make my work work around me. Incredible. And it provides a safety net, right? So a lot of you are like, you'll say to me, I really want to start a business, but it's too risky.

And my counter to that is staying in a job that's sucking the life out of you is the biggest risk you will ever take in your life because it's going to cost you your mental, your physical, your emotional, your spiritual wellbeing. It is going to cost you all of that and then some, maybe even your relationships.

And so I want you to really reframe your thinking around that and think, Okay, how can I build a hybrid nursing career where I'm doing nursing, low stress, low key role that I show up, I do the work, I've kind of almost like maybe semi quiet quit, but I do the work and I'm safe and I deliver the care. And then I start transitioning myself out by building a bedside escape plan, and I create a business that works for me, that allows me to do that, without fully leaving the field until I'm ready, until it's time to go all in, until I've generated enough income to go, okay, this is totally doable.

Let's make this work. So my story here is that I did 6k in the first six months of my business, 2020. Then 2021, I did 23k because I was doing exactly this. I was trying to make nursing and my business work at the same time. Now it took me a year to do it. In fact, if I was to do it again today, I would be able to do that much faster because now I know and I can teach you how to do the same thing.

But you could effectively transition over a 6 to 12 month period and then go all in. The year that I went all in my business, I made 142, 000. I was making 130, 000 as a nurse unit manager. That's actually a lot. I made 142, 000 plus. I was still dabbling in nursing that year. So I was still doing some agencies and marketing, so I probably made an extra 20, 25k that year.

So I made like 160k. It's nearly like over 25 percent pay rise. So it allows you to transition out with a safety net so that you can stop telling yourself the lie that it's too risky. Okay, that is a hybrid nursing career. And I think that we're sitting on an opportunity here, like it's a point in time.

Where we could effectively save so many nurses from completely quitting and leaving nursing. Because here's what I know to be true, when I did the transition, I actually much more enjoyed nursing. And I hear this a lot from my nursepreneur clients. When they do this, and one of them's just reduced their hours, and they've started looking at what that looks like.

And they're spending two days a week in their business, and three days a week in their job. And they're like, oh I really enjoy the three days when I go to work. I really like the time that I spend there. And so I think that it would help nurses, it would help retain nurses who might otherwise leave entirely, that just want to create something that generates them 1, 000 a month extra, or maybe 5, 000.

What they would be doing maybe in overtime, and then some, they could generate through a hybrid nursing career model. And then I think if we had people building something outside of work that is leveraging their skills, their passions and their purpose, work doesn't need to be that. So, my career coach, when I first started career coaching on this journey in 2020, she said to me, maybe your career is not the thing that lights you up.

Maybe it doesn't have to be that. Maybe it just pays the bills. And I was like, Oh, that's a new line of thinking. Cause I never thought of it like that. I never thought of it as just a vehicle for giving me income. So I think that it could save a lot of nurses from leaving the profession completely. Being able to Dabble in it and transition over time where they could leverage the skills, knowledge and experience, and I think that naturally would help regulate the industry and help regulate the nurses, well being and burnout and nervous system dysregulation because we know that when people are in a state of fight or flight, they're going to be, you know, showing up and not contributing.

You know, the number of meetings that I used to have as a nurse student manager where no one would offer any value whatsoever was because everybody's dysregulated and burnt out. No one has the space, the time to think. They're in a constant state of adrenaline surging through their body and they're high cortisol and there's no way that their brain feels safe enough to offer an idea or an opinion.

But when you start giving people space and they do three days a week and you let them have their side hustle. And they're creative and playful in that side hustle and they're generating income and then they come back to work, they're going to be much more regulated, they're going to be in a much better state and space to be able to deliver better care.

I reckon we would compound the positive impacts of this on the system that would massively outweigh the negative that would come from this. And so we can start to create a culture where nurses, you know, are clinical experts but they also have their own thing that promotes financial independence within nursing so that we're not having to be at the beck and call of the system and that we're not having to go sure I'll work, you know, 12 hours overtime so that I can make extra money this month, that we package up our skills and we do that online in our own way.

So I want you to invite yourself to think about and reconsider, reevaluate what nursing might look like for you moving forward. The reality is the industry has changed. Even in the 10 plus years that I've been in the industry, I've seen dramatic shifts and changes. And if you're fed up of telling the same story and experiencing the same crap from the system, maybe it's time to give yourself permission to dream, to explore, to think what could be possible beyond the bedside.

What would a hybrid nursing career look like for you? You don't need to know what you would offer. You just need to know that that's maybe something that you would want to explore. If you felt that kind of desire or something light up inside of you today to go, Oh, that actually makes sense. It's an indication that maybe, just maybe, this is the path that you should be exploring and taking.

So you can find more balance, purpose and sustainability within your nursing career. I don't want to live in a world where people feel like they have to choose between staying or leaving, right? I think that we need to live and create a nursing world where We create nursing careers and pathways that are flexible and adaptable that meet the needs of people that work in the system That also will benefit from the billion dollar creator economy that we currently live in in this digital era so that we stop Telling people that you can Get more skills, get more qualifications, and you'll make more money because that's just not true in the nursing realm.

You'll get your 1 to 2 percent pay rise if you're lucky, and then you might get a professional development allowance. What I've seen to be true is those that have invested in building a business for themselves, their income dramatically compounds over time. In vast comparison to what they could have ever generated, having just done a postgraduate qualification and taking home an extra 80 bucks a fortnight on your professional development allowance.

Think about how if you spent that time and that money. Invested that into yourself in building an asset. Profitable income producing asset Could you create something that generates more than 80 a fortnight? I'm guaranteeing you you absolutely could and it would take you less time and money less blood and sweat and tears And you'd be able to have more flexibility than you would by having to do more work at work and be full time and get your extra 80 bucks.

So I digress a little bit but I'm very passionate about helping nurses see the fact that what we're sold as the path does not need to be the path and I do believe that hybrid nursing careers will be the norm and that it's up to us. Those of us that are ambitious, driven, motivated and high performing that know and can't see themselves moving forward in the system to start to show others that this is possible.

So my friends, I hope I've given you some insights into my thoughts about where we're headed and the future of nursing careers. It feels like a grieving process because so many of us came here to nursing to be able to help and we just don't feel like we can do that and we can't do that in the current economy and in this era when we're not catching up and the system is not catching up to allow us to benefit from the current shifts that are happening in society and in the landscape online.

So my friend, do you see this as the future of nursing? What would your ideal hybrid career look like? Would you be three days a week with two days in your business? I want to hear from you. Come and message me across at the Nursepreneur Academy. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode and letting me share my thoughts with you today. And until next time, stay safe, stay forever curious, and start thinking about how you can build your hybrid nursing career.