Career: Nurses Options

Nursing as a career offers the most extensive fields of specialty among the professions. There are about 101 specialties and subspecialties listed. We will explore them all so you can be guided accordingly in your quest for the perfect specialty field of practice. With these resources, no nurse will be left unemployed. There will always be something good for everyone.

The Night Owls

Also known as the "Midnight" or "Graveyard" shift

 

While we do not advocate for unusual habits and lifestyles, nursing will never survive without the night nurses. For a little night differential and a lot more consequences, we admire and salute these nurses who complete the care that we give.

 

You are as important as any nurse. You may have felt the other way, but you are special. And in this Nursing Office, you are never forgotten! You are very much a part of the team.

Telenursing/Distance nursing: The art of caring in the 21st century

 

Another nursing specialty has emerged from the calls of today’s technology: telenursing, also known as distance nursing. This art of caring uses telecommunication devices in order to deliver nursing care, including the coordination of patient care and management.

 

In 1997 the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing published AAACN Telehealth Standards to direct nursing practice in this developing area of nursing. Since then, telenursing has been gaining momentum. Featured telenursing topics at AACN 2011 conference in San Antonio included telephone triage outcomes, legal issues in telenursing and managing outbound calling programs.

 

Loretta Schlacta-Fairchild, Ph.D., RN, is the founder and President of iTelehealth Inc. She sees “the practice of telenursing as the catalyst that can completely reframe our profession and take nursing into the 21st century.” Viewing telenursing as an emerging role in today’s health care world, she cites the following benefits of this new technology:

  • reduces costs;
  • reaches populations in rural, mostly underserved areas;
  • reduces transportation time and cost for patients and providers;
  • provides patients better access to care; and
  • Improves productivity in the home health care field.

Combining caring and nursing with technology is the way to go this 21st century, adding telenursing as a sub-specialty practice for nurses in partnership with patients who are technically savvy. Telenursing is now utilized in telephone call centers and in treating the chronically ill at home through the use of TeleCare devices.

 

Reference: Phoenix/FOCUS 2011

 

Traditional Nursing

The foremost nursing career is the bedside nursing: dealing directly with the care of the sick in the bedside, like in a medical-surgical, obstetric, pediatric, orthopedic, oncology and many more specialty category of patients based on their conditions and diagnosis. This nursing practice is highly specialized because nurses deal with a certain or particular condition in general.

Being the “traditionalists” of nursing, they still cling on the terms and characteristics of the old nursing practice from the time of Florence Nightingale, like “ my patient…”on duty”…,”ward….” “head nurse…”and other terms, aside from wearing white starched uniforms and caps as well as non-rubberized nursing shoes. These nurses strongly believe that nursing means taking care of patients, bathing, feeding, walking them .These nurses work in hospitals, in-patient, acute or chronic care facilities. They feel pride in “taking care of patients” when they are sick, until they are well enough to take care of themselves.

These nurses are the nurses that are well-pictured in the patient’s memories, especially children, who when asked to picture a nurse will say, “a lady in white with the needle".

Nurses in a Medical Ward Nurses in a Medical Ward