Nursing Career Options
Nursing is a profession that plays an important role in every segment of the community in various kinds of setting. With a shortage of nurses, especially registered nurses, you have a lot of nursing career options to choose from depending on your qualifications. Unlike what most people think, the nursing profession is quite lucrative considering the number of vacancies and the bare applicants. Here are some of the best nursing career options you can choose from.
Registered Nursing as a Nurse Career Option
The nurses of this type are expected to serve patients of different kinds over a wide range of settings. They are supervised by doctors and their work includes administration of medication and injections, assessing patients, developing patient-care plans and getting important signatures.
Nurse Practitioner as a Nurse Career Option
This is one of the best nursing career options because as a nurse practitioner, your job is more advanced where you are authorized to work on your own- diagnosing diseases and writing prescriptions without the supervision of a doctor. A nurse practitioner may also deal with a specific field like midwifery, women’s health, family care, neonatal care, etc.
Specialized Nursing a Nurse Career Option
As the name suggests, a specialized nurse works in a specific field of nursing. There are several specialized nursing options to choose from, some of which are as mentioned below:
- Acute care nursing
- Oncology nursing
- Pediatric nursing
- Psychiatric nursing
- Gerontological nursing
- Home health nursing
Location-Specific Nursing Options
Nursing career options can be classified depending on the various tasks performed by nurses in different locations and settings like hospitals, health-care centers, schools, offices, military camps, prisons, etc. Some of common options include:
- ER nursing: involves taking care of patients with acute pain
- OR nursing: involves taking care of patients pre and post surgery, assisting operations, preparing recovery charts, monitoring symptoms and helping patients in pain management.
- Hospital nursing: this involves working in different departments of the hospital, taking part in OR and ER staff work.
Upcoming nursing career options
The following are some of the newest trends in the nursing profession:
- Forensic nursing:
This field involves working with victims of criminal cases whether it is abuse, murder or sexual assault. The job of a forensic nurse is analyzing body evidences and therefore helping investigators in their job.
- Legal nurse consulting:
This is one of the highest paid nursing career options you have today. In this field, a qualified nurse is expected to work with the legal aspects of medical cases and working with insurance policies. A legal nurse consultant helps lawyers understand the working procedures in the hospitals. This job is one of the highest paying ones in the nursing profession today.
- Travel nursing:
If you like traveling instead of staying pinned in a single place and working all your life, you have the option of choosing travel nursing. This nursing career option is a highly lucrative one too. In fact, in most cases, you don’t even have to worry about your relocation expenses as the job covers these for you.
