I'm a registered nurse in Ontario, Canada. A few years ago the law changed that new nurses need degrees, but there was a grandfather clause so diploma nurses already working didn't have to go back to school.

I did a degree myself, in one of the two year "second entry" programs for people with previous degrees and science background. On the whole it was a very distasteful experience.   While I'm glad that nursing education has grown out of the days that nursing students were basically the hospital's slaves, I think there's been a major wrong turn away from practical training and towards theory. Virtually nothing that I heard in a classroom was in any way useful in how to take care of sick people. It was all about "the meaning of illness in the human journey" and "the caring model vs. the helping model" and how to write an abstract or research proposal or use APA format.

While I did manage to learn a few useful things, it was all from the clinical rotations, not the classes. And while clinical rotations are a start, there just wasn't enough to really get competent in anything - really, we learned that techniques existed, not how to do them. I graduated and started working feeling that I didn't know anything - I didn't even feel comfortable with IVs (and I'm not talking about venipuncture here... I mean, I didn't know how to prime a line without getting it full of bubbles). And to be clear, I was a good student... passed the boards on first writing, and was invited to join the Sigma Theta Tau "Honour Society of Nursing" (basically a club for people who got As in nursing school to pat each other on the back...).

So how did I learn to be a nurse? At work. My hospital orientation included four weeks of classroom training before going onto the floor, then a period of one-on-one apprenticeship with a senior nurse. When I was officially "oriented" and had my own patient assignments, I was still very dependent on pestering the nurses around me for information and for help with procedures. Fortunately, it's commonly understood on the job that nursing school has become bullshit and that you learn by experience... so the senior nurses know that you're new and need help. Now that I have a couple of years experience, I definitely consider it part of my job to help the newer nurses.

A few people have raised the issue of what roles belong to what kind of caregivers, so I'll tell you that in my part of the world, this is very dependent on the institution. As a student, I visited a nursing home where the RNs were managers, the RPNs administered the drugs, and the PSWs (Personal Support Workers) did all the personal care. I also visited a psychiatric hospital where RNs and RPNs filled almost identical roles for very different salaries (I think intramuscular injections had to be done by RNs). I'm currently working at a prestigious research/teaching/tertiary hospital that doesn't hire RPNs or PSWs at all; and yes, I do change my patients' bedding myself.