Originally Posted by Rain'sWhisper
Hi, I will be starting nursing school January 17, 2006 and was wondering about the nursing shortages. I know that there are overall nursing shortages but is anyone able to tell me what areas of nursing have the most shortages and why? Just curious. Thanks.
I would say the largest shortage of nurses would be in the area of Med/Surg. This is because Med/Surg (Medical - Surgical nursing) is the most common area of nursing; it's also the area where most nursing students spend a lot of their clinical time. Although many large hospitals will take new grads into other areas such as labor/delivery, pediatrics, emergency dept., operating room most graduates get their first job in med/surg. Hmm...what else... oh, I know of many critical care units that seem to be desperate.
In my area, there are always a ton of people applying for the one or two Labor/Delivery and Operating Room vacancies that come up every few months... we certainly don't have a shortage of those, however, things could be different in other parts of the country.
One nurse there is definitely not a shortage of would be nurse practitioners (but that requires graduate school). My area is beyond saturated with them (and I'm not even in northern California where I hear you can't swing a cat without hitting one) that the unit I was on last year had two working at the bedside on med/surg (and weren't happy about it).
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