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HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST NURSING
SPECIALTIES
A lot of people ask me about my opinions on where they should start off or where they should go when nursing. I wanted to do a quick article about nursing specialties and how I believe that you should choose your nursing specialty or the things that you should consider when you're choosing your nurse specialty. I think one of the most beautiful things about nursing is not just a career stability but it is the career variety. There are so many avenues to utilize your nursing degree, your skill set and your passion - for that reason, I think nursing is such an amazing career. There are a few ways that you can figure out what's the best fit for you. You can use your clinicals if you're in school. During clinicals, you go to different settings, different units, floors and so on You can use that to get a tiny taste of what things are like on that specific setting. You can also use YouTube or people you may know that are in different fields. On YouTube, you can find people in all kinds of different settings that will give their perspective. And like I said, if you know somebody or know somebody that knows somebody that know some about it, then you can ask them. There's also reading job descriptions on career boards or Google. But then, there's a few questions that you need to ask yourself and with these questions, you can't allow other people to answer them for you or make you feel bad for the answers that you come up with. I came up with six questions that I think that you should ask yourself in order for you to find the specialty that best fits you.
Question 1.
Which age group and I'm most comfortable with caring for.
Adult or Children
This one really only set splits up into two categories; there's adults and children. Now these two categories obviously have subcategories; there's older adults and there's babies. But these are the two categories, who do you feel most comfortable with caring for. There are very few settings that you'll deal with both, ER being one of them, you may see both of them but most often they they are split up into those two areas.
Question 2.
Do I want to heavily interact with patients and Families.
Directly or Indirectly.
This is another question that I do not want you guys to let anybody make you feel bad for whatever your answer is. If the if the answer is no for you that is perfectly fine. You be honest with yourself and go to where you need to be rather than letting somebody else make you feel bad into getting into the bedside and you have no bedside manner or no care for any patient or their mama. So, answer that question for yourself. Do you want to be on the front line of things? Do you want to interact with the patients and the families, if not, maybe you should consider areas like surgery and PACU, Catheterization Laboratory- interventional type areas. Maybe even nursing education or administration. Well, administration, you still deal with people but you can figure out what subcategory you can find yourself in that doesn't have as much direct patient and family contact.
Question 3.
Do I prefer short-term or long-term care.
Now, this question is in regards to patient turnover and continuty of care. Are you the person that just want to stabilize the patients and transfer them off to wherever they need to be. Areas like ER like I said, PACU and in surgeries, Cath labs, even clinics - you don't see them every single day. And intermediate and long-term care are going to be your ICUs, your med surges - floors that are going to keep patients more continuously.
People say that, you know, nursing saves lives. CPR is not the only thing that saves lives - booboo. There's a whole prevention side of medicine and it is perfectly fine for you to want to be on a more prevention side of nursing, education, medication compliance and just like maintaining health rather than being on an intervention side where you're responding to these critical and emergent situations, trauma and things like that. Willingness can help with the readiness. You can get ready but are you willing? Are you willing to be in those high-stress critical moments. I think those areas are pretty obvious, as far as critical care, trauma, emergency surgery. So, figure out where you are most comfortable and what you are willing and prepared to do. I know TV, TV gives you this perspective that if you're not like hustling and bustling through the hospital, running and pumping on people's chest and intervening in high stress environments that you're not a good or important nurse. Like I said, prevention would keep Critical Care Nurses out of a job, honestly.
Question 6.
Which Environment Appeals To Me.
They're going to be a couple of different environments that you will find yourself working in. There's going to be clinics, there's going to be hospitals at the bedside and then there's gonna be hospitals more on an interventional side which is the procedures that I talked to you about There is prisons, psychiatric facilities and laboratories. Which area appeals to you? What are you interested in? Are you interested in prison nursing? Are you interested in working at a clinic. These are questions that you have to ask yourself and you have to answer honestly and truly. So I think with the combination of those tools you can really figure out where you are interested in working and another beautiful thing about nursing in addition to all this variety is that you have the option to move around within all of these areas. You don't have to let go back to school, for the most part there are certain things where you need extra training or an extended orientation period. But you don't have to go and get any extra degrees for any of this, you can move within all of these areas if one doesn't work for you.
So if you answered all these questions and you think you found the perfect fit get working into it. And if you realize that it is not what you thought it was and it doesn't suit you, well, you can always just go to another area and try it again. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again so that's another beautiful thing about this whole thing. I hope that this helps. Thanks for reading.
