Clinical nurse specialist: What I do and how much I make
About this video
Alden Egan, a 31-year-old clinical nurse specialist in Los Angeles, earns $125,000 a year and explains how location affects pay. She educates nurses, runs an orientation class for new cancer patients, and represents nursing to hospital leadership. Her worst days involve slow change in a big organization, and her best days come when nurses or patients tell her she made a difference.
You'll be able to
- describe the main duties of a clinical nurse specialist.
- explain how where you live can affect your salary.
- describe what makes the job frustrating and what makes it rewarding.
Key words
- Clinical nurse specialist
- An advanced nurse with a master's degree who improves nursing practice through education, expertise and leadership.
- Patient orientation
- A class that helps new patients understand their treatment and the resources available.
- Hospital leadership
- The managers and executives who make decisions for the whole hospital.
- Initiative
- A new plan or project an organization starts to reach a goal.
Transcript
My name is Alden Egan, I'm 31 years old. I'm a Clinical Nurse Specialist, and I make $125,000 a year. So I've only been a Clinical Nurse Specialist for a year, but my income is very competitive, especially for that amount of experience. Los Angeles pays very well for this role.
If I lived somewhere else in the country, I would probably make about $100,000 a year, or possibly less. One of the main things that I do is provide education to nurses, that could be on new equipment, on skills, or knowledge that they need to upkeep in order to provide good quality patient care.
I run a new patient orientation class. I get to meet with all of our new patients, and teach them about what it's like to launch into their cancer treatment here, and give them a lot of information about available resources and other things that will help them along their journey as they're getting their treatment.
And then, I finally get to work a lot with the hospital leadership. In that role, I serve as a representative for nursing practice, and get to speak to how different hospital initiatives will either impact nursing, or ways that nursing can help them to reach their various goals.
My worst day on the job would be when I recognize what the right thing to do is, and for whatever reason, there's barriers in making that happen. Working in a large organization, change can be very difficult, and it can be very slow. (laughs) And so that can be really frustrating, when you just want things to be right.
My best day on the job would be when I feel like I really made a difference. From a nurse telling me that I really helped them to understand something, or that they were really happy that somebody finally addressed this certain need that they had. This is probably the best thing, is when a patient gives me feedback that what I did made a difference to them.
I recently got a compliment from my new patient orientation class, from a patient, a patient's son who attended, and he said that although they had been coming for over a month, he still learned so many things that he knew were going to be useful to him and his mom, and that he felt fortunate to have been able to attend.
And that really made me feel good, and made me feel like the efforts were worth it. That was a good day on the job.
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