How Do You Science | Meet a Nurse Practitioner

Welcome back, young scientists. I’m Dr. Universe.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve got lots of big questions about our world. Today we're talking to nurse practitioner Bevan Briggs.

Warning! This episode very briefly mentions intestines, body fluids, shots, stitches, broken bones, surgery, kids putting on pretend wounds (with intestines!) to help EMTs train, and the fact animals are butchered for food in some homes. If that doesn't sound like something you'd like to hear, I'll catch you on the next one. If you're not sure, ask your grownup to preview the audio or transcript. (I used italics in the transcript for anything that might be a little bit gross so it's easier to scan.) =^..^=

• Learn what a nurse practitioner does
• Hear about seeing surgery for the first time and wearing pretend wounds to help train EMTs on ambulances when he was a kid
• Discover what nursing school and nurse practitioner school are like

Resources You Can Use

• Do this body parts word search or labeling game
• Check out weird body stuff: how dogs detect things in your breath, why gross stuff makes us squeamish, and how scientists study viruses

As always, submit burning questions at askdruniverse.wsu.edu. Who knows where your questions will take us next.

Transcript

Dr. Universe

Welcome back, young scientists. I'm Dr. Universe, and if you're anything like me, you've got lots of big questions about our world. When I was a kitten, I visited the veterinarian to get checkups and shots.  But a human kid like you might go visit a nurse practitioner.  That's why I talked with Bevan Briggs.

He's a nurse practitioner who's helped me answer lots of questions about the human body.  I have to warn you that this episode mentions blood and guts. If that's not something you like to hear about, that's totally okay. I'll just catch you on the next episode. But if you're okay with mentions of guts and other gooey things, let’s get started.

I was wondering if we could start out by talking about what a nurse practitioner is. 

Bevan Briggs

A nurse practitioner is an advanced practice nurse.  And so, what that means is we have all the training of the registered nurse, and we have a license to be a registered nurse, but then we have additional training that allows us to have a bigger scope of responsibilities and privileges than what a registered nurse does.

Dr. Universe

So, like, sometimes a nurse practitioner might be your primary care provider? 

Bevan Briggs

Absolutely. 

Dr. Universe

Like, you can see them, and they figure out what's wrong with you.  They figure out how to treat it and do the whole shebang. 

Bevan Briggs

Yep. And that's what I do when I'm working in my clinic. People come to me, and across the hall, they're seeing a family physician, and we are doing the same thing.

They come in, and they say, "Hey, you know, I need to be checked out for my cough or my infection or my cholesterol has been high." And I talked to them about, "Okay, well, yeah, your cholesterol is high. Your blood pressure is high. Let's give you these medications. And, oh, by the way, how are you doing on this other thing? And it looks like you haven't had this other screening test. Let's get that taken care of" and stuff like that. 

Dr. Universe

So, what's the difference between a nurse practitioner and a doctor? 

Bevan Briggs

Mostly it's background. So, to be a physician, you get a bachelor's degree. And then you go to medical school, and you learn all about how to be a doctor. You learn about anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, what medications you're using. But then you also learn about the different branches of medicine. So, like family medicine, where you're taking care of primary care things, general surgery, psychiatry. You learn a little bit about all of those different things.

With a nurse practitioner, you go to nursing school.  You get a bachelor's degree in nursing, and then you work for a while as a registered nurse. Then you can go on in the nurse practitioner program. So, the students that I have for the nurse practitioner roles get a doctor of nursing practice. And so technically their title is doctor. It's not the same as a physician because their background is in nursing, but some of the roles are similar.  

Dr. Universe

When you're in nursing school, is it partly learning from books and lectures and stuff and also partly hands-on learning stuff? 

Bevan Briggs

Yes, that's exactly what it is. The first two years that you're in college, you'll be learning the stuff that you really need to understand when you're going to be taking care of people. So, anatomy, physiology, psychology, microbiology, nutrition, those types of things. And then, you know, the other things like English. You need to be able to know how to write. You need to be able to know how to do research.

Once you get into the actual nursing program, though, that's when you're seeing patients. And so, at Washington State University College of Nursing, the first semester, they're learning things about how to be a nurse, like what are the roles, but you're also learning how to take care of patients. 

So, how do you use a stethoscope? How do you take a blood pressure? How do you look at patient problems? So, somebody comes in and they have pain in their stomach. How do you evaluate that, and how do you communicate that? They're learning about how diseases affect your physiology. They're learning about how drugs work in the body and stuff like that. And while they're doing that, they're learning about how to take care of patients. How do you give somebody a bath? How do you pass medications? 

Then the next semester they go into the acute care setting. So, they're learning even more about those things, but they're taking care of patients in the hospital that are really sick. And they're learning how to manage those medications in the hospital and how to tell that somebody is getting sicker in the hospital and stuff like that. The next semester branches out a little bit into taking care of specific populations. So, they're looking at pediatrics. So, taking care of kids and then taking care of family issues, like when moms are having babies and stuff like that.

And then the final semester, they look at psychiatric nursing, community health nursing, and then they have what they call a practicum where they're out there with a nurse, you know, doing basically everything that they would normally be doing as a nurse. You know, working side by side with a nurse for a while. 

Dr. Universe

When you are a student and you first start working like hands on with patients and in hospitals and stuff, how does that feel? Does it feel exciting? Does it feel scary? Like that's a lot of responsibility. 

Bevan Briggs

That's a great question, and it's both.  I remember my very first day as a student nurse, we were on the orthopedic floor, and they wanted us to just go in and introduce ourselves to a patient. We just had to go in and say, "Hi, I'm a student nurse. I'm going to be here tomorrow." And I was absolutely terrified. But I went in there and it's like, it's just people. Yeah. They're having some kind of a health issue, but it's like, they have a family. They got there in a car. You know, they might have a dog or a cat. And so, you get to make those connections to sort of develop that relationship. And that's what's really fun. 

But then there's the cool stuff. The first time I was in the operating room, I was looking through the scrub room window.  And so, you can see the patient's lying on the operating table. There's the surgeon standing there. There's a scrub nurse. Anesthesiologist was at the head of the table. And it was a bowel surgery. And so, there's a pile of intestines on the guy's chest. I don't even remember what they were doing, but they just put everything back in and, you know, fixed everything up. But that was really cool. 

You know, like the first time I was in the emergency department, somebody came in with a cut or something like that. And I got to help them suture it. But see, that's working as a nurse.  When you do it as a nurse practitioner, you're doing the suturing, and that takes it up to the next level. 

Dr. Universe

Suturing is stitches. 

Bevan Briggs

Stitches. That's correct. Yeah. 

Dr. Universe

So, some of the things that you probably do as a nurse or a nurse practitioner, in addition to being a little bit intense, could probably be a little bit gross. Like there's blood and stuff like that. Did you know that you would be okay working with that? 

Bevan Briggs

I did. Not everybody does, but that's the thing. As a nurse, you are dealing with every private detail of people's lives, and sometimes it can be uncomfortable. I mean, every body fluid there is. You're dealing with a vomit. You're dealing with poop. You're dealing with blood. You're dealing with cerebral spinal fluid. Every fluid in the body you're dealing with. And you see every single weird thing. So, you know, somebody comes in with a compound fracture. They've got the bone sticking out of their leg. You're the one that's seeing that. 

Dr. Universe

So, if somebody is scared of blood or like really grossed out by it, but they think they want to have that job, is that something you can get over?  

Bevan Briggs

I think it's something you can get over. But the thing is there's so many different areas in nursing and advanced practice nursing that have nothing to do with that. So, I mean, yeah, you have to be able to deal with it through nursing school and stuff like that. But I have tons of colleagues that they're working as nurses, but they're not dealing with anything like that. They're doing case management where they're dealing with insurance companies. My colleagues that are psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners, they don't have to do exams like that and worry about blood and different things like that. They can. They're trained in it.  But that's not part of their daily existence. 

Dr. Universe

And those are nurse practitioners who help people with things like mental health, like their feelings and things like depression and anxiety. 

Bevan Briggs

Exactly. As a family nurse practitioner, I deal with the depression and anxiety. Sometimes those cases can be a little bit more complicated. And those are the things that the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner excels in. 

Dr. Universe

What is the very best part of your job?  

Bevan Briggs

I think the very best part of my job is working with young families. I absolutely love helping kids out that are scared about getting shots and, you know, helping them through that. Or, you know, helping people when they're in really rough situations. They're scared. They don't know what's going on and just helping bring them comfort. That's probably the best part of it.  

Dr. Universe

Yeah, it seems like you're in a really unique position to be there for people on like the worst day of their lives. 

Bevan Briggs

Absolutely. 

Dr. Universe

Or really scary times. 

Bevan Briggs

Mm hmm. Yeah.  

Dr. Universe

Did you always know that you wanted to be a nurse? 

Bevan Briggs

When I look at what I do every day, it's what I thought I wanted to do when I was a kid thinking that's what I wanted to do when I grow up. I didn't know that it was going to be as a nurse practitioner. I thought that it was going to be as a physician. When I was in college, I was doing a lot of volunteer work and stuff like that. I liked what the nurses were doing. I liked that kind of relationship, and you know, there were other factors too, but that was one of the big reasons that I changed from looking at going into medicine and changed to go into nursing.

From the time I was pretty young, like six or seven, my mom was an EMT. We lived in a rural area. 

Dr. Universe

EMT is the person who might come in an ambulance if you have an emergency.  

Bevan Briggs

Correct. An EMT stands for emergency medical technician. And so, that was in the 70s, and they were just starting the idea of having EMTs in the community. And so, our community didn't even have an ambulance. So when they got an ambulance, they're training all the local people that were interested in being emergency medical technicians. And so, my mom would get a call and they'd say, "Okay, there's a car wreck or somebody's sick" or something like that. So, they would go in the ambulance and take him to the hospital.

But while she was being trained, they did these mock accident things. So, all of us kids got to strap on these gruesome wounds and stuff like that. And I mean, it was fun, but that was one of the first things that I think that got me thinking about it. And after that, that was kind of always my trajectory.

Dr. Universe

It was like to learn how to help people. They needed people to pretend to be hurt with like Halloween kind of costumey wounds.  

Bevan Briggs

Kind of. I mean, they were these rubber wounds that they would like strap onto your leg. And, you know, so we had to have clothes that they could cut and different things like that.

So, like somebody had this thing that they strapped onto their belly that had the intestines coming out, you know, and all of us kids were like, "Oh, I want that.” And then, you know, they put makeup on us so that we looked pale. And so, they wanted it to be as realistic as possible. But it was a blast. That's one of the best memories I have from my childhood, you know? And like I said that was one of the things that kind of put me on the trajectory of wanting to be in healthcare.  

Dr. Universe

That's amazing. You were like, this is it.  

Bevan Briggs

Yeah. 

Dr. Universe

I see my future. 

Bevan Briggs

Uh huh.

Dr. Universe

It involves intestines. 

Bevan Briggs

Well, exactly. Well, see, that's the thing, you know, growing up on a farm, we would butcher animals to eat, you know, and I loved it. It's like you got to see what it looked like on the inside. 

Dr. Universe

We're not a kid that was grossed out by body stuff. 

Bevan Briggs

You know, if somebody was bleeding, I'm like, "Oh, let me see." You know, and that's the thing. It's not for everybody. You deal with people that don't smell good. You deal with people that aren't very nice. You deal with people that call you names.  And it's all part of the job. 

Dr. Universe

And it's your job to help everybody no matter what. 

Bevan Briggs

Pretty much. Yeah.  

Dr. Universe

Do you have any advice for kids who think that they might want to have a job like yours someday? 

Bevan Briggs

My advice is to do everything. Don't limit yourself to just looking at one thing. Do everything. Be involved in everything. So, you know, if you like sports, do sports, but make sure that you're looking at math and science. Make sure that you read. And then just do things where you get a chance to help people and do service for other people.  

It's a ton of fun. It's, well, and fun isn't necessarily the best word. It's really, really rewarding. It can be fun. You can do things where you're having a good time, but even when you're in the thick of something that's really hard. It's still rewarding.  

Dr. Universe

That's all for this episode, friends. Big thanks to Bevan Briggs for teaching me about nursing. 

As always, if you've got a science question for me, you can submit it at askdoctoruniverse.wsu.edu. That's A S K D R U N I V E R S E dot W S U dot E D U. 

Who knows where your questions will take us next.