Do you think that nursing is a dangerous job? what about blood borne pathogens and disease?

can this occupation cause a lot of sickness in you????

OSHA has done a wonderful job at setting up guidelines that either prevent or greatly limit ones exposure to blood borne pathogens and contagious diseases (like TB, SARS, etc).

For drawing blood, we have now special needles that retract into plastic housings to prevent us from accidentally sticking ourselves with used needles. Hospital rooms (and now many emergency rooms) have negative pressure rooms that filter the air inside of them for patients who have TB, or anything transmitted via airborne route. The list goes one, but each hospital is required to have a standardized set of protocols on how to deal with patients with various types of infectious diseases, patients who have things that can be easily transmitted to other patients (MRSA) or patients who are easily suseptible to disease (immunosuppressed)

Having only worked in emergency rooms, the old saying goes that every nurse is as sick as a dog for their first year. After that, you've already been exposed to everything under the sun, and your immune system gets stronger after that. And, actually that seems to have been the case for me: my first year as a nurse I was out all of the time, now I only get mildly ill for a few days at a time.

Most of the injury or risk that I've seen has been more the result of the job itself: all of the lifting, pulling, stretching, etc. associated with the profession. For what it's worth, nursing can be very labor intensive at times, and hospitals are now starting to realize that and have safety classes on the movement and transfer of patients, and also stretching exercises for nurses to do to limit the chance of a job-related injury. (The last hospital I worked at actually had one!)

Nursing is no more dangerous than a lot of jobs. The main sicknesses are caused by stress or back pain but in regards to the latter there are strict health and safety regulations in place to prevent this now.

I agree with Joanna - nursing is probably safer than some jobs. There are very strict cross infection control procedures and regulations within all medical facilities.

forget nursing...be a tree surgeon

i've been a nurse for years and have never picked up anything other then an occasional cold. Wearing gloves, washing your hands and following proper procedures greatly reduces the risk of picking anything up.