Nurses and doctors roles

The way I think of it is that doctors are disease specialists, no matter what their area of practice. The aim of medicine is to diagnose, treat and ideally cure disease. Although in practice it's messier than that & doctors do take into account social & psychological circumstances of patients, it's the patient's condition/illness/disease that is the doctor's primary concern.

Nursing is about caring for the whole person. Obviously that includes medical procedures & administering meds, but also about looking at their wellbeing from all angles- helping with activities of living, making sure spiritual needs are met, etc. (Could write a lot more but need to get ready for work!)

When I was doing my research on nursing I found the first few chapters of introductory nursing textbooks to be helpful- maybe try to seek one out in your uni library?

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Thanks for your reply- are you a student nurse?

Not yet, but have a place to start in September

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I think nursing involves a more holistic view of the patient, as the poster above says you take care of physical, mental, emotional needs and since I work in a long-term unit I'm very much involved with the relatives whereas the doctors at work only see the patients for less than an hour a week. It's very much a caring job as you're doing it all the time right down to feeding and changing patients, which I like as I feel then that I'm making a difference and I enjoy looking after them And I do agree that medicine is just treating the illness rather than the whole person.