This is a good thread. Tom’s shadowing suggestion is honestly the most useful advice in here, you can read about scope of practice all day but you don’t feel the difference between “diagnosing” and “being with the patient for the next eight hours” until you watch it happen in real time.

One thing I’d add for Jamie: pay attention during that shift to who’s actually doing the hands on assessment work, repositioning, wound checks, titrating meds based on how the patient looks right now. That’s a different skill set than diagnostic reasoning, not lesser, just different. Some people love the puzzle solving distance of medicine, some people want to be that close to the physiology for the whole shift. Neither answer is the “safe” one, they just use different parts of your brain.

Also seconding that it’s not a wall. My aunt did nursing first, bridged into med school in her 30s, and she says the nursing years are why she’s good at the parts of medicine that actually matter on the ward.