14 Oct Oil Rig Nurse

If you’ve had enough of nursing in a hospital or simply want a complete change of scenery, then becoming an oil rig nurse might be just the career change you need.

Ideally, you’ll be a registered nurse with experience working in an emergency department because accidents, broken bones and even burns can be some of the things you’ll be treating if you decide to pursue an offshore oil rig nursing career.

Oil rig nursing usually appeals to single registered nurses (RNs) who don’t mind being away from their friends and family for long stretches at a time. Offshore oil rigs work around-the-clock 365 days a year.

As an oil rig nurse, you’ll typically work a 12-hour shift 7 days a week for a continuous 6 month period. Then you’ll enjoy 6 months of downtime to go back home or take a vacation and spend some of the $120K plus that you can make each year from oil rig nursing.

An Oil Rig Nurse Has To Deal With Every Medical Problem

By their very nature, offshore oil rigs can be dangerous. The rigs are often located in the middle of the ocean sometimes hundreds of kilometers away from shore. As the only medically-trained person on-board, an oil rig nurse must take care of all emergencies, accidents and illnesses.

Every oil rig nurse must be trained to diagnose and treat a wide-range of medical problems as as triage patients, provide life-saving procedures and handle any necessary evacuations to onshore hospitals. This can include controlling bleeding after an accident on the rig, calibrating drug dosages and applying immobilization techniques.

Offshore oil rig nursing offers you a lot of autonomy and the chance to shine on your own. Doctors are usually hours away onshore and you can speak to them by radio, phone or on the Internet if an emergency arises that you can’t handle alone.

The Duties Of An Oil Rig Nurse Vary Greatly

But mostly as an oil rig nurse you’re on your own looking after the healthcare of around 150 people and making all the important medical decisions yourself. Other oil rig nursing duties include maintaining all medical records, the ongoing training of riggers designated as first aiders, ordering all medical supplies and necessary equipment and coordinating the sick bay.

An oil rig nurse is often part of the offshore rig’s senior management team too. Your duties can include management meetings and providing weekly and monthly reports about what supplies and medical services, products and medications are required. Along with detailed reports on accidents, injuries and absenteeism through illness.

Every oil rig company has different medical and work safety procedures. Some rigs place a lot of emphasis on occupation health while others can be more fixated on administrative duties. As an oil rig nurse you will need a great deal of flexibility in how your handle your role.

Life on-board for an oil rig nurse can fluctuate between exciting and exhilarating to frustrating and boring. Some days you can be working flat out treating cuts and scratches and strains. Or a bout of illnesses might strike the rig and you’ll have a queue of men attending sick bay.

On other days, nothing much can happen at all which will give you the chance to catch up on paperwork and administrative chores like medical checking supplies and making sure all of your emergency medical equipment is in proper working order.

One thing that an oil rig nurse never has to worry about is doing their own cooking, cleaning and laundry. This is all taken care for you. As an oil rig nurse you can expect to be well fed and have your own separate room to live in with complete privacy with your own TV, DVD player and Internet access.

Accommodation on modern oil rigs are often compared to luxury hotels or that which you can expect to find on good cruise ships these days. So your day-today living requirements as an oil rig nurse are all taken care of. It’s also an opportunity for you to save some extra money because all of these living expenses are included in your package.

Oil rigs are always alcohol-free and bringing alcohol on-board can get you fired instantly. There is usually a store on-board where you can buy your toiletries, candy and other little luxuries. With oil rigs operating throughout the world and nearly all of them requiring medical personnel, there are good oil rig nursing jobs available at the moment. If you are considering becoming an oil rig nurse this is a good time to look into securing a position.

The top oil producing countries are the United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada , Russia, the Iran, and China. In the United States most oil comes from Texas, Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Mexico. There’s also major boom in the natural gas sector in the U.S and there are now plenty of oil rig nursing and natural gas rig nursing jobs available in Rocky Mountain states like Wyoming.

One of the great things about becoming an oil rig nurse is that you are not confined to just getting a job in America. You could got to work in a place like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a modern and very wealthy country in the Middle East where you don’t have to pay taxes.

Like many countries in the Middle East, the UAE is a big oil producer with a great many onshore and offshore oil rigs operating around the capital Abu Dhabi. The country is heavily dependent on foreign workers and to get a job as a oil rig nurse there you would only need to be a Registered Nurse (RN) with a few years experience working in an emergency ward, certified in CPR and first aid, and able to speak good English.

You don’t have to worry about speaking or understanding Arabic because everyone you’ll be working with is fluent in English. But this is just one example of many opportunities available if you decide you give up the rat race and put your nursing skills and experience to use as a highly-paid oil rig nurse.