Here is some insight from my GF (Who is a Physician...cardiac surgeon not a nurse, but works with nurses)
START RANGRZ GF
To become what one normally thinks of as a 'nurse' it is a 4 year degree. That will qualify you to write the exam(s) to receive your license to practise as a Registered Nurse. From there, you will likely end up in a day clinic or hospital, under the supervision of a senior Nurse and a Physician. I am not 100% on how nursing specialties work. What I do know is that you can specialized with time and training to all sorts of niches. Psychiatry, Emergency, Perioperative, pediatric, intensivist, any other branch of medicine that exists, so will a nursing subset of it.
You can do another 4(?) years of school and become an N.P. This allows you have your own clinic and carry out the same scope of practise as a Family Physician. Else, it allows you to work in a more dynamic environment such as leading the anaesthesia team in the O.R., flying on-board the aeromedical helis along with the Critical Care Flight Medics. All the way to, in some rural area's, overseeing the entire E.R. during nights and weekends when Physicians are hard to come by.
Might say tho, that becoming an N.P. is more or less as difficult as becoming a physician, and it does not offer the pay or 'glamour' For example, as a Cardiac Surgeon in a large city hospital, I make >$500,000, I have my own nurses and my own N.P. who are more or less my bitches and I can not just told "Oh Dr.Liz, you are not in the O.R./I.C.U./E.R. tonight, your cleaning up slobber in peds oncology."
A nurse can. That said, I do work a lot of nights and work over 60 hours a week. But nurses are essential to my job, and if you want to be one, go for it! Its a lot of work, but like all medical fields, the fact you get to help people is rewarding and is a better payment then that coloured paper they give me.
End Dr.Liz
For whatever its worth, I figure I'd let her post.