Bachelor RN only !

TheCommuter, BSN, RN · Aug 13, 2014

It depends on what you want to do with your career. Many acute care hospital systems and public health operations prefer or require new hires to have earned the BSN degree at the very minimum.

However, an ADN or nursing diploma still suffices for most specialties outside the acute care hospital setting: private duty, home health, hospice, long term care, adult daycare, assisted living, developmental disabilities, psych, correctional nursing, ambulatory clinic nursing, physical rehabilitation, and so forth.

Miewn · Aug 13, 2014

So you're saying that, in order for someone that is a RN with a ADN background can only get jobs that are revolved around the secondary recovery portion and not the immediate care?

TheCommuter, BSN, RN · Aug 14, 2014

So you're saying that, in order for someone that is a RN with a ADN background can only get jobs that are revolved around the secondary recovery portion and not the immediate care?

No, I didn't say that...

A nurse with an ADN and ten years of valuable critical care experience should easily find employment in the acute care hospital setting. However, in the past five years or so, many nursing employment markets across the US have been glutted with too many new grad nurses, so the human resources personnel and recruiters can effectively reduce the number of people who apply by requiring applicants to have earned the BSN degree.

Of course, this depends on your location. Many hospitals in larger cities are only hiring new grads with BSNs, whereas small towns and rural areas with smaller applicant pools still readily hire new RNs with associate degrees or diplomas.

TC3200 · Aug 14, 2014

So you're saying that, in order for someone that is a RN with a ADN background can only get jobs that are revolved around the secondary recovery portion and not the immediate care?

In some places, yes, this is already reality. Large urban areas that have access to a large number of BSNs cranked out of several universities are already at that point, because there are so many BSNs that they have no trouble finding experienced BSNs to hire. I know several diploma RNs who have been employed fulltime at the same hospital for years, and were given an ultimatum to complete a BSN within a certain timeframe or else lose their jobs.

Rural areas are lagging behind that, but are being forced to change due to Affordable Healthcare Act, magnet status, push from their marketers and administrators who want to show that the rural hospitals can keep up with the big guys, etc.

The hospitals in western PA that still operate diploma RN schools have, in all cases, set up affiliations with area universities to roll their diploma graduates directly into a RN to BSN degree program. In some cases, the hospitals running the diploma schools have already stated a drop-dead date after which only BSN new-grads will be hired. In other words, they won't even hire their own nursing school grads unless those grads have finished the RB to BSN bridge first.

In the associate degree RN programs, they are seeing hospitals no longer offering their sites for clinical experiences for the associate degree students, because those hospitals are no longer hiring any new-grad associate degree RNs. The diploma school that I attended didn't have much pediatric work at all, so it resorted to labor/delivery, computer simulations, mannequins, and days at Head Start facilities after another area hospital suddenly refused to allow the diploma school students to do peds clinicals there. In some areas of the country, colleges and community colleges have eliminated their AD RN degree programs BECAUSE of the lack of local clinical opportunities and employment opportunities for their students.

Healthcare is a *business.* And there will be fads and fashions that come and go. I think there was much less of that when MDs and DOs primarily owned and ran hospitals. But now the administrators are administrators, and may or may not know much about the skills needed and how actual work of patient care gets done.