Is there job security for nures in the TN area?

I think nurses should make a good salary simply because of the responsibilities that they carry. However, I don't think that the pay should be equal to that of the higher paid M.D.'s. Perhaps the Nurse Practitioner or the DNP should have salaries comparable to those of M.D.'s, but certainly not the ADN or BSN. The years spent working on an undergraduate degree studying to obtain and keep competitive grades in addition to the years spent in medical school are years without steady income. This does not include the high cost of the extensive education. An M.D. or an advanced nurse has to make up the difference for the years that they were not making money, and they should be compensated for the increased responsibilities and liabilities.

I have a MS in genetics, and now I am taking on more loans to get an RN. I hope to get a DNP in the near future. I am already 80K in debt, and I anticipate that I will be over 100K in debt by the time I am finished, and this is if I can work and make a halfway decent income while I am going to school. This was not possible when I was in graduate school for my science education, so I lived on loans.

Although, I will say (and I do not have experience yet as a nurse) I believe nurses do NOT get the respect that they diserve. I think that many people still have the mentality that a nurse is the doctor's handmaiden instead of automatically giving the respect that a professional diserves. I might go as far as to predict that most nurses would choose the increased respect over salary,but like I said, I am still in school, so I may be totally ignorant!

Currently a LPN who has noticed that a lot of the hospitals in my area, chattanooga, tn, do not hire lpn's for hospital care any more. i personnally think that if hospitals were to utilize the lpn then the rn's could get a lot more done with the more critical patients and not feel pressured with excessive amounts of charting all the time. That's something i know if i were a rn i would appreciate all the lpn's help on the floor with the patients. if each patient had an rn and an lpn then the patient care would be even better, not to mention the charting would be even more efficient. better patient care is a definite plus, what if it were your family member?