Good Aspects Of Med-Surg Nursing?

For a new graduate, medical surgical nursing gives a broad background and an introduction to a variety of patient populations. Usually a you will be offered to take charge sooner in a medical surgical unit. It is a great place for nurses to start.

A great opportunity to develop assessment skills for various conditions, practice therapeutic communication, refine your time management and prioritization skills ---- since you will care for patients with a multitude of conditions you will be challenged to learn a lot about a lot.

It is the "backbone" of nursing, and where the greatest number of acute care jobs are. It's a great area to develop your overall nursing skills, knowledge, and expertise.

As a person that gets bored easily, med-surg has been a great fit for me because you just never know from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute what will happen next. I love the variety of patients, illnesses, and never ending learning experiences. I have been a med-surg nurse for 6 years, and have just moved on to house supervision but still tend to migrate to med-surg when everything gets crazy. There are any number of specialty units, but med-surg combines them all - we get peds, cardiac, post op, cancer, gi, geriatric, bariatric, urology and anything else that comes along....

Med-Surg seems to combine a lot of what is taught in the classroom.

Your newly learned skills won't get "rusty", like they may for example, if you went directly into a speciality such as OB, etc.

Tons of new learning opportunities. I love it!

Good Luck!

Med surg is the boot-camp of nursing. Everybody should have to do their time here and get the training before they specialize. (If they dont decide to stay in med surg, that is). These days I'm seeing nurses starting out in ICU, ER, L & D etc straight from school?? !!! It just doesnt seem right

Med surg is a specialty on its own. We see a diversity of medical conditions that expand our knowledge day by day. I always said I didnt want to start in Med surg but now I am so glad I did. It has made me more comfortable in all aspects of nursing.

Nowadays, I tell every nursing student or new graduate nurse I meet to start out in med-surg. If I could go back, I wish I had started out on a med-surg floor. Instead, dummy me agreed to start out in CCU as a new grad and did a critical care orientation program as a graduate nurse. That turned out to be a huge mistake for me. I transferred to a cardiac telemetry floor, since I wasn't cut out for CCU as a new nurse. Nowadays I am working on a medsurg/tele/neuro floor, that is about 50% med-surg and 50% neuro, with some pts being on tele. I am learning a lot and seeing everything.